NVIDIA is building BioNeMo into the shared AI infrastructure layer for drug discovery, cementing partnerships with Thermo Fisher and Eli Lilly.1 A wave of specialized foundation-model platforms — Natera, Boltz Lab, Owkin, Edison Scientific and Basecamp Research — are launching on or alongside the platform.1
Incumbent pharma is restructuring around this AI-native model. Novo Nordisk shuttered its internal cell therapy unit and licensed the program to AI-platform company Cellular Intelligence.1 Novo posted strong Q1 earnings and saw its stock rally, a sign investors are rewarding the pivot away from in-house biology toward AI partnerships.1
Not every biotech IP holder is ceding ground. MindWalk Holdings Corp. is defending its foundational HYFT patent, EP3881326A1, with a new filing, EP26187897.9, covering a distinct and additive layer built on top of it.1 "It is the computational layer built on the original foundation, not a re-filing of it," the company said.1
MindWalk's new patent covers how biological patterns get organized into meaning that's reusable across infrastructure, customer programs and AI workflows — an interpretive layer that sits above foundation models like BioNeMo rather than competing with them.1
The pattern points to a market splitting into layers. NVIDIA and its ecosystem partners are consolidating the computational substrate — models, compute and data pipelines — that pharma companies plug into. Legacy IP holders like MindWalk are racing to stake out the layers above it before that substrate becomes uncontested. Novo's move to license out an entire cell therapy program, rather than run it internally, is the clearest signal that drug discovery is shifting onto shared AI platforms instead of proprietary in-house R&D stacks.