Japan built the world’s most trusted names in medical technology and biopharma. Now the
country’s healthcare leaders are engineering the next generational leap with AI, powered by
Nvidia.
In a speech in Japan, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang talked about how the country is embracing autonomous surgical robots, AI-accelerated CT systems, agentic drug discovery platforms and virtual cell models. Japanese innovators are deploying Nvidia technology to reshape medicine at every level.
Agentic AI Accelerates Japanese Drug Discovery
Japan’s pharmaceutical leaders are uniting around AI-powered drug discovery. Tokyo-1, the AI drug discovery consortium and platform operated by Xeureka, continues to expand, with Eisai joining this past April, bringing together leading pharma companies — Astellas, Daiichi Sankyo and Ono Pharmaceuticals — all advancing drug discovery using Nvidia BioNeMo.
Astellas has deployed nearly all BioNeMo NIM microservices within NVIDIA’s digital biology portfolio and is running BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, NVIDIA’s open platform that turns any AI
agent into an autonomous life sciences scientist. It gives AI agents, software platforms and
biopharma systems immediate access to NVIDIA’s full life sciences stack.
Ono Pharmaceuticals is using the Boltz-2 NIM microservice to streamline and accelerate internal drug discovery. Daiichi Sankyo is conducting ultralarge-scale virtual screening on
Tokyo-1 and leveraging NVIDIA RAPIDS to accelerate large-scale data processing. Xeureka is
using NVIDIA BioNeMo to power its AI-driven drug discovery efforts, enabling researchers
the flexibility to use the most appropriate models and tools across diverse discovery
programs.
SyntheticGestalt announced two products: the molecular AI foundation model ZAO and the
molecular generative model KOYA. ZAO is a foundation model that converts small molecules into data AI can use, through a “4D” representation that captures the multiple 3D conformations a molecule actually adopts; as a single general-purpose model, it ranked No. 1 on nine public drug-discovery benchmark tasks, achieving the world’s best performance.
KOYA is a molecular generative model that designs novel, high-affinity ligands for a target protein while closely reflecting the user’s intent. Both products can be called from the Nvidia BioNeMo Agent Toolkit, enabling AI agents to carry out everything from evaluating molecules to designing them, and to accelerate drug discovery in collaboration with researchers.
Biomy is pioneering a virtual cell foundation model with a massive clinical dataset from the
Japanese Foundation for Cancer Research. Using NVIDIA single-cell RAPIDS, Biomy achieved 90% faster spatial transcriptomics analysis. Biomy will use Nvida Nemotron-powered agents to autonomously propose and orchestrate complex virtual experiments for drug development.
Takeda recently announced a collaboration with Boltz to deploy the BoltzMol-1 and BoltzProt-1 biomolecular models across its research organization, giving scientists tools for structure prediction, affinity estimation and generative design that integrate into existing discovery workflows. NVIDIA accelerates these models through NVIDIA BioNeMo with libraries such as cuEquivariance.
Physical AI Enters the Operating Room
Kawasaki Heavy Industries provides technology designed to improve the overall efficiency
of hospital operations, including with its FORRO, Nyokkey and NURABOT robots.
The company plans to use NVIDIA Holoscan IGX, Isaac for Healthcare, Isaac GR00T and
Cosmos to develop surgical support functions, nursing assistant and hospital transport
robots.
Direava is developing a surgical vision language model for real-time surgical video understanding and natural language interaction with surgical scenes. Direava aims to evolve this technology into an intelligence layer for future surgical AI and physical AI in the operating room.
Nvidia Accelerated Computing Powers Japan’s Next-Generation CT
Two of Japan’s leading medical imaging companies are now shipping next-generation CT
systems built on Nvidia GPUs.
Canon launched Japan’s first Nvidia-accelerated photon-counting CT system, marking a
step forward for the country’s next generation of medical imaging.
Fujifilm has commercialized Japan’s first whole-body CT system powered by Nvidia Blackwell, using diffusion-based deep learning reconstruction to improve image quality.
The integration of AI and accelerated computing into medical imaging equipment contributes to improved image quality, enhanced accuracy, early detection and higher standards of medical care.
Together, these advances signal a new era: AI, and not just accelerated computing, is no longer an experiment in Japanese healthcare. It’s infrastructure.