NVIDIA soars, inks deals with Lilly, Verily

NVIDIA's stock market value crossed $5 trillion this week as investors bet that demand for the company's specialized artificial intelligence chips will continue to soar. Concurrently, the company announced a series of deals with life sciences companies, illustrating industry's desire to spend money with the tech titan.

Eli Lilly will work with NVIDIA to build what it claims will be the "most powerful supercomputer owned and operated by a pharmaceutical company." Most of the capacity will be going to small-molecule, large-molecule, and genetic medicines discovery. STAT's Brittany Trang caught up with Lilly leaders about the effort in a new story. Read more here.
Fresh off revealing the contours of its refreshed care and research offerings, Verily announced it will integrate Nvidia tech into its Pre data platform. As part of this, the Nvidia tech will be used on NIH's All of US research program which has collected data from over 600,000 participants, including whole genomic sequences and wearable device data. As a demonstration of Verily's new Nvidia powered capabilities, researchers developed a multimodal foundation model using All of Us data that shows promise for future applications like predicting patient outcomes. The work is detailed in a preprint here.
At Nvidia's event this week, Genesis Therapeutics claimed that its new protein structure prediction model, calledPearl, outperforms existing models such as AlphaFold3 in predicting how small molecules bind to proteins. The company is also changing its name to Genesis Molecular AI to better emphasize it's "pioneering foundation models for molecular AI" and to help in recruiting AI talent, said a spokesperson. A paper on the model, coauthored with NVIDIA, is available here.

healthcare

Optum gets into the claims AI competition

A new offering called Optum Real — yes, form the UnitedHealth subsidiary — aims to speed up the medical claims adjudication process in real time, which may help eliminate the suspense as you wait for a bill in the mail that tells you how much you owe. The new offering comes amid a growing use of AI by providers and insurers angling for an edge in the billing and payments process. Can Optum's product create harmony between all? Brittany explores in the latest edition of her AI Prognosis newsletter.

business

When will things look better for Teladoc?

From the beginning, it was evident that 2025 would be basically a throwaway year for Teldadoc's business as the virtual care giant aimed to stabilize post-Covid. That reality was evident in its quarterly earnings that, as expected, showed a year-over-year revenue decline driven by the company's shrinking direct-to-consumer mental health company BetterHelp whose revenue was down 8% over the previous year. Teladoc this year made some strategic acquisitions and launched a new insurance covered and employer sponsored mental health offerings in hopes of setting itself up for future success. With Q3 on the books, analysts are starting to look ahead, and the initial takes are tepid.

"Into 2026, we expect only modest sequential improvement," wrote Evercore ISI's Elizabeth Anderson, adding: "Management commentary suggests another investment-heavy year, with operating leverage remaining limited until new offerings gain scale in late 2026 or 2027."

Health tech news roundup

Google launched a public preview of the Fitbit health coach announced over the summer. It's available to Fitbit premium subscribers.
Curve Biosciences raised $40 million led by Luma Group to develop its business, including a "Whole-Body Blood Test" it hopes will help people anticipate chronic disease and guide treatment. Underlying this offering is "the world's largest collection of manually curated tissue samples characterized by organ and disease state."
Arya Health raised an $18.2 million Series A for its tech that helps "home health and post-acute care providers automate scheduling, compliance, and other administrative operations." The funding was led by ACME Capital.
I forgot to mention this on Tuesday, but it's significant: Axios reported that Epic will end the Workshop program that took a stake in scribing company Abridge. That stake was 7% to 9% of the company, and Business Insider previously reported that Epic sold it earlier this year. Over the summer, Epic announced its own scribing solution that will compete with Abridge. As we reported, Abridge has had to reassure customers that Epic won't block its access to the EHR.

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