Owkin partners with NVIDIA to upgrade OwkinZero biological reasoning model

Owkin said it will collaborate with NVIDIA to upgrade OwkinZero, its biological large reasoning model, marking the company’s first formal collaboration with NVIDIA.

Owkin said the work will use NVIDIA’s Nemotron open models alongside the NeMo framework to strengthen the agentic foundations of OwkinZero. The aim is to build the infrastructure required for what the company describes as Biological Artificial Super Intelligence, or BASI, a concept centred on AI systems capable of advanced biological reasoning across drug discovery and development.

According to Owkin, the upgraded OwkinZero model will leverage NVIDIA NeMo RL, an open reinforcement learning library within the NeMo framework. The enhanced model is expected to power the next generation of Owkin’s agentic AI capabilities, enabling systems that can plan, reason and act autonomously across complex biological tasks.

Thomas Clozel, M.D., co-founder and chief executive of Owkin, said the collaboration reflects the scale of the challenge involved. “Building the first Biological Artificial Super Intelligence requires not just powerful models, but the right agentic infrastructure and toolkits to scale them,” he said.

Owkin said the collaboration will focus on improving the performance, scalability and robustness of its biological reasoning systems, while also strengthening guardrails to ensure safe and reliable deployment. These improvements are intended to accelerate drug discovery and development pipelines and ultimately improve clinical success rates, an area where the industry continues to face high costs and failure rates.

OwkinZero sits at the centre of the company’s strategy to combine large-scale biological data with advanced AI reasoning. By incorporating NVIDIA’s open models and tooling, Owkin is seeking to move beyond static predictive models towards more dynamic, agentic systems that can iteratively explore hypotheses, design experiments and adapt based on new data.

The partnership highlights the growing convergence between AI infrastructure providers and biotech companies, as life sciences firms increasingly rely on specialised AI frameworks to tackle the complexity of biological systems and reduce the time and cost required to bring new therapies to market.

The Recap

• Owkin and NVIDIA begin collaboration on OwkinZero model development.
• Collaboration uses NVIDIA NeMo framework and Nemotron open models.
• OwkinZero will power agentic AI through Owkin K and AI Scientist.