Danish pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk is integrating artificial intelligence from US-based OpenAI across all its divisions to accelerate drug development, the company said. The maker of popular diabetes and obesity drugs Ozempic and Wegovy did not disclose financial terms of the partnership but said pilot programmes will begin in research, manufacturing and commercial operations, with full integration planned by the end of 2026. The agreement complements the company’s existing AI initiatives, including a research contract with NVIDIA signed last year.
Novo Nordisk aims to speed up everything from drug discovery to production planning in order to regain lost ground in the competitive obesity drug market, the company said. Although the Danish firm was first to market with the current generation of powerful weight-loss treatments, it has lost market share to its US rival Eli Lilly.
Novo Nordisk CEO Mike Doustdar said the OpenAI deal is not about replacing scientists but about making them more productive, and the same applies to many of its employees. The goal of the partnership is to help the company identify drug targets faster, design more efficient clinical trials and extract clear insights from its internal data sets, he said.
Novo Nordisk employees already had access to a specialized version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, but the new partnership goes beyond that, the company said. The partnership ensures data protection and human oversight and builds on existing AI projects with other partners, the company said.
Since taking over as CEO in August, Doustdar has reorganized Novo Nordisk’s workforce, cutting around 9,000 jobs and introducing what he called a culture of efficiency based on faster decision-making.
Eli Lilly, however, is also staying in the AI race, the report noted. The US drugmaker recently announced the launch of a supercomputer built in partnership with NVIDIA to accelerate research and drug development. According to the developers, the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD supercomputer, equipped with DGX B300 systems, has no equivalent anywhere in the world.
