Danaher, NVIDIA team up to put AI inside scientific instruments

Danaher's October 14 collaboration with NVIDIA builds on an earlier announcement, made on October 7, 2026, of plans to launch its first AI-powered autonomous lab. That lab is based at Abcam, a Danaher company, and combines technologies from Danaher operating companies Beckman Coulter Life Sciences, Cytiva, Genedata, Integrated DNA Technologies and Molecular Devices in one connected workflow, with device orchestration and robotic automation from collaborative work with Automata. The same October 7 release disclosed that Automata received an investment from Danaher in January 2026.

The autonomous lab is designed to help researchers develop custom antibodies and other molecular tools. Danaher said it applies AI to create new affinity reagents, including antibodies, then builds and tests each candidate, with every result returned to the model to improve the next design. The company said the lab is designed to deliver up to 8x faster discovery of affinity reagents and up to a tenfold increase in annual reagent generation, from tens to hundreds of reagents per year as the lab scales.

Danaher described the autonomous lab as the first step in a broader initiative to create smart instruments, integrated workflows and autonomous labs. Under that program, the company said, instruments are being designed to be easier to integrate and control programmatically, to produce AI-ready data and to include expert-level agentic systems designed to simplify operation, improve data quality and generate deeper insights. These devices can then be connected into integrated workflows and autonomous labs that execute design-make-test-learn cycles.