Johnson & Johnson MedTech announced the launch of the Polyphonic AI Fund for Surgery in partnership with a coalition of companies, including NVIDIA and Amazon Web Services (AWS), to invest in projects and research that advance AI-enabled surgical innovation. 

The fund will focus on supporting the development of AI models, AI governance, and data engineering and management.  

Initially, the fund will utilize Johnson & Johnson’s QuickFire Challenge, its crowdsourcing platform, to gather applications and award grants to academic and non-academic institutions, developers, startups, researchers and established companies.  

The awardees will receive financial assistance as well as resources and mentorship, including developer workshops and programs on J&J MedTech, NVIDIA and AWS technologies. 

Johnson & Johnson MedTech, NVIDIA, and AWS will select the awardees.

“The program aims to mobilize through 2026, including grant funding from Johnson & Johnson MedTech and/or access to computing tools, tech-stacks, solutions and compliant datasets from Johnson & Johnson MedTech and its partner network,” Johnson & Johnson said in a statement. 

THE LARGER TREND

The fund builds on Johnson & Johnson MedTech and NVIDIA’s previous collaboration, announced last year, to accelerate the analysis of surgical data through the Polyphonic Digital Ecosystem. 

The companies signed a memorandum of understanding to speed up AI innovations for J&J’s surgical technologies portfolio with NVIDIA’s healthcare platform.

The partnership aimed to further AI innovations for operating rooms, addressing challenges associated with surgical learning and proficiency, data privacy, and the automation of surgical data enrichment, as well as enhancing efficiency in research and development.