LONDON – U.S. chipmaker Nvidia Inc. is investing £40 million (US$51.9 million) in building a supercomputer in Cambridge, U.K., to be dedicated to applying artificial intelligence in drug discovery and in health care.

Recursion Inc.’s combination of machine learning and artificial intelligence, coupled to its wet lab work, caught Bayer AG’s attention so solidly that its investment unit, Leaps by Bayer, led the charge on Recursion’s new and oversubscribed $239 million series D financing.

While the retail, security and entertainment sectors dove in early with the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technologies, the life sciences sector has “been a bit of a laggard, frankly,” said Pratap Khedkar, a principal at the Evanston, Ill.-based consultant firm ZS Associates.

Columbia University professor and robotics engineer Hod Lipson knows the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) on a global level. “It permeates everything we do, from the stock market, from predicting the weather to what product you’re going to buy,” he said Wednesday during the second day of the virtual Ai4 2020 conference. “It’s even grading essays. You name it.”

Investigators have developed a new approach to classifying neurodegenerative disorders that used the overall patterns of protein aggregation, rather than specific proteins, to define six clusters of patients that crossed traditional diagnostic categories.

The importance of artificial intelligence and machine learning continues to be acknowledged by drug development companies. Recently, to help accelerate the discovery of therapies to treat COVID-19, several deals have been forged to deploy those tools.

Nineteengale Therapeutics is a new joint venture that was launched to fill a large void. Cyclica Inc., along with its partner, Neurotheryx Canada Ltd., both of Toronto, created Nineteengale to find and develop cannabinoid-inspired drugs for bipolar disorder, anxiety and pain management.