Scripps Research will advance biomedical AI through the Huang Foundation Compute Grant, an in-kind grant supporting projects including a virtual human immune system and charting the 'dark' proteome.
LA JOLLA, Calif., Oct. 19, 2026 — Artificial intelligence has already shown great promise across many areas of biomedical research, from accelerating scientific discovery to speeding the translation of biological insights into new therapies. Scripps Research today announced that it has received a significant award of in-kind compute power from the Jen-Hsun and Lori Huang Foundation to advance the adoption of AI in biomedicine and help realize its potential. The grant, totaling more than 14 million hours of compute time, is provided through the Huang Foundation's partnership with CoreWeave using NVIDIA GPUs.
"This philanthropic investment from the Huang Foundation, which brings leading computing expertise and infrastructure, represents a significant commitment to advancing human health," says Scripps Research professor Andrew Ward, who is helping lead the research efforts with the foundation. "Paired with Scripps' world-class scientists and unique combination of foundational and translational research, we aim to shorten the journey from scientific breakthrough to something that can make a real difference for patients."
Artificial intelligence holds significant potential for biomedical research and healthcare, but insights alone do not improve patient outcomes. With this new support, multiple Scripps Research scientists are deploying state-of-the-art computational power to transform how vaccines, antibody therapies and small molecule drugs are discovered. Across these projects, the overarching goal is to advance AI from initial promising demonstrations to reliable, widely usable tools.
"Some of medicine's greatest opportunities lie in biology we have never been able to see clearly: how antibodies evolve to fight disease, and how proteins move to reveal hidden targets for new drugs," says Jensen Huang, Co-President of the Huang Foundation. "Scientists at Scripps are using AI at scale to simulate both, building a virtual model of how our immune system creates antibodies and a dynamic map of the human proteome. The Huang Foundation is providing compute to model this extraordinary complexity, and the resulting tools will be openly available for scientists everywhere searching for new medicines."
By providing access to more than 14 million hours of compute power, the award not only significantly compresses scientific timelines but also enables Scripps Research scientists to think at a scale unimaginable just a few years ago. The novel, large-scale datasets generated at Scripps Research, which are the lifeblood for training next-generation AI models, can now be fully leveraged to make quantum leaps across scientific disciplines.
One project is Antibodies for All, led by Professor Bryan Briney, which aims to build a "Virtual Germinal Center": an AI system that models how human antibodies mutate, bind their targets and are selected during an immune response. Trained on millions of paired antibody sequences and detailed structural data, the system will allow researchers to test candidate vaccines and search for therapeutic antibodies computationally before advancing the most promising options to experimental testing. The project has the potential to replace years of trial and error with faster, more informed design, improving the ability to respond quickly to emerging pathogens and to target diseases that remain difficult to treat.
The award also supports Professor Stefano Forli's team, which is working on the "dark" proteome: the thousands of human proteins whose dynamic behavior has resisted structural studies and kept them out of reach of drug development. By simulating these proteins at scale under realistic physiological conditions, the team's system aims to capture how these molecules flex, breathe, fold and shift, revealing transient druggable pockets as they appear. Analysis at this unprecedented scale could potentially unlock treatments for previously "undruggable" diseases.
Briney's and Forli's teams will also leverage additional experimental data from the labs of Ward; Christopher Parker, professor and The Abide-Vividion Chair in Chemistry and Chemical Biology; and Benjamin Cravatt, professor and the Gilula Chair of Chemical Biology. Together, these projects help position Scripps Research at the leading edge of computational biomedicine.
"We've already seen how AI learned to predict 3D structures from amino acid sequences alone," Ward continues. "The foundation's generous support will help usher in the next wave of AI: one where models can anticipate function, reveal druggable sites, and link molecular patterns in cells and tissues to underlying health conditions, among other exciting frontiers in biomedical research."