Behind the Headlines Episode 32: AI’s Power, NVIDIA & Lilly, Revolution Medicine

Behind the Headlines bi-weekly episodes examine the ongoing trends, factors and fashions that cause pharmaceutical news to happen. Panelists are a mix of consultants, venture capitalists, scientists, patient advocates, journalists and editors. Each episode talks about the current of the preceding weeks that are on everyone’s lips but seeks to highlight the more enduring lessons that hide behind these headlines.

In this episode, Walid Kamoun, MD, PhD, VP, global head of R&D Oncology, Servier, and Alex Philippidis, senior business editor, Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News, Inside Precision Medicine and Mary Ann Liebert, Inc—in the wake of the book-end JP Morgan Healthcare Conference (JPM) in San Francisco—examine the fast-changing landscape of manufacturing re-shoring, research budget cuts, and the consistent migration of AI approach from fear of missing out, or FOMO, a few years back to practical implementation and return on investment in commercial manufacturing and clinical trial settings.

Reflecting on the signals emanating from JPM, there appears to be a shift in the JPM landscape in the departure of almost all major payers, such as Centene Corporation, Cigna Healthcare, and Humana, among others. In fact, the only payers present this year were Alignment Healthcare and Clover Health, two small insurance tech companies. None of the for-profit health systems were on site either. Overall, a “get comfortable with uncertainty” mantra framed a modestly optimistic outlook.

Patent cliff exigencies fueled high expectations for deals, but apart from the $1Billion, 5-year NVIDIA-Eli Lilly launch of an AI co-innovation lab to reinvent drug discovery,¹ silence was the loudest message, especially in regard to a highly anticipated Merck acquisition of Revolution Medicines (up to $30B) for its cancer drug, daraxonrasib.²

According to the NVIDIA press release,¹ “The collaboration will initially focus on creating a continuous learning system that tightly connects Lilly’s agentic wet labs with computational dry labs, enabling 24/7 AI-assisted experimentation to support biologists and chemists. This scientist-in-the-loop framework aims to enable experiments, data generation and AI model development to continuously inform and improve one another.”

Most of the conversation centered on real-world implementation of AI in drug development, upon which Walid says, this is “the space where, in my view, there is still a high level of untapped potential, [where] there has already been a lot of disciplines that have worked on clinical trials simulations, identifying patient populations by subdividing, understanding the heterogeneity within and between patients, identifying which patients at the end will respond, and being able to predict the best way possible to accelerate the trial, and accelerate bringing the molecule to the patient. For me, this is the place where the value is the highest.”

References

1. NVIDIA. NVIDIA and Lilly Announce Co-Innovation AI Lab to Reinvent Drug Discovery in the Age of AI. Press release. Jan 12, 2026.
2. Nguyen, KP. Merck Ends Acquisition Talks With Revolution Medicines After Valuation Dispute. Yahoo! Finance. Jan 26, 2026.