Recursion Pharmaceuticals

Recursion Pharmaceuticals Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery and radically improve lives.

Traditional drug discovery methods are inefficient and expensive – approximately 90% of all drugs in clinical trials ultimately fail to get approved and the total investment needed to develop each approved medicine exceeds $2 billion. This inefficiency occurs because biology is extraordinarily complex, and our industry has historically lacked the tools to understand how it functions. At Recursion, we’re harnessing the convergence of multiple breakthrough technologies that allow our scientists to explore uncharted areas of biology and unravel its complexity to navigate the path to better treatments. We have built a massive proprietary biological and chemical database that predicts trillions of relationships across biology and chemistry, many of which are not known in scientific literature. Our approach generates novel insights, broadens the scope of potential medicines, and truly industrializes drug discovery – increasing the scale, speed and efficiency of each step of the process. We believe our technology and approach has the potential to not only radically improve the lives of patients, but also change the landscape of drug discovery and development forever.

💊 Where AI is delivering in drug discovery today.A recent story by Peter Sullivan in Axios looked at how AI-led drug dis...
04/02/2026

💊 Where AI is delivering in drug discovery today.

A recent story by Peter Sullivan in Axios looked at how AI-led drug discovery and design is changing everything from pharma to federal policies. He notes that its being applied to “shorten development times, lower costs and predict chemical properties that humans don’t have time to examine.” Recursion CEO and President Najat Khan, PhD shared that drug discovery is actively moving from an artisanal “to a much more systematic approach.”

The story notes that Recursion “reported positive data in December from a trial of its drug candidate to treat a rare genetic condition that can lead to colon cancer” – the first clinical validation of our AI platform.

And it’s only the beginning, as the FDA adjusts its guidelines to meet the AI moment, and companies like Recursion continue to integrate new data layers and uncover new biology using AI and machine learning.

As Najat said: “There’s going to be some skeptics, but they will come around once they see data.”

👉 Read more:
https://www.axios.com/newsletters/axios-vitals-4ebcf430-1eeb-11f1-8976-3bfa8f4ea3ea.html

💊 Ready to join a company that’s at the forefront of transforming how medicines are made?👇 We have a number of open role...
03/27/2026

💊 Ready to join a company that’s at the forefront of transforming how medicines are made?

👇 We have a number of open roles on our People team, including:

▪️ Director, Organizational Development & Effectiveness
▪️ Global People Systems Lead
▪️ Senior Recruiter, UK
▪️ Total Rewards Specialist (FTC)
▪️ People Operations Generalist (FTC)

We’re looking for candidates who bring interesting experiences and paths; who are located in the Salt Lake City, New York City or London / Oxford metropolitan areas, and who are passionate about getting better medicines to patients faster.

👉 Learn more at our Careers page: https://www.recursion.com/careers

03/26/2026

🚀 AI’s current proof points in drug discovery – and the next frontier

In an interview with the BioCentury Inc. Show, Recursion CEO and President Najat Khan, PhD talked to executive editor Selina Koch, PhD about the differentiators to look for as the TechBio industry matures.

“The bar and the standard is evolving around ‘what is the endgame?’” Najat says. “And the endgame is to make differentiated medicines that matter…no matter what dataset you have, what model you have, or what approaches you’re using.”

She points out that while many early stage companies are focused on building models, Recursion is in the next stage of its evolution: delivering proof points. That requires an end-to-end approach, she says. “It’s not enough to be better in just biology, chemistry, or the clinic. You have to use AI across the entire vertical tech stack.”

Najat shares how she sees AI’s most measurable early advantages emerging in chemistry and clinical trial ex*****on. In ClinTech, Najat notes that Recursion is applying AI to improve patient stratification, drive smarter trial design, and accelerate enrollment.

The next frontier, she says, is “out-of-domain” prediction — the ability for models to make useful inferences in less-charted biological terrain.

👉 Listen to the full podcast here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfGy7FvHk0A

03/24/2026

Last week, we held an event called “An Evening of Hope” in honor of Rare Disease Day.

Speakers included rare disease advocates, researchers, patients, and community members who shared their personal stories, breakthroughs, and messages of hope.

▪️ Recursion Chief People and Impact Officer Erica Fox advocated for direct action, research, and community involvement to change outcomes for rare disease families.

▪️ Patients Oskar Szajnuk & Ava Szajnuk, with Rare & Undiagnosed Network RUN shared their long "diagnostic odyssey," with over 60 syndromes and diagnoses among their immediate family without a definitive root cause or cure.

▪️ Kelvyn Cullimore, President and CEO of BioUtah, noted that Utah’s life sciences industry employs 180,000 people and contributes over $22 billion to the state’s economy.

▪️ Justine Case, a member of the Utah Rare Disease Advisory Council, highlighted the critical role of policy work to overcome systemic barriers, such as lack of insurance coverage and difficulties in receiving diagnoses.

▪️ Stacy Allen shared the story of her son’s battle with Cystic Fibrosis, describing the decades of parent-led advocacy and research investment that turned a terminal diagnosis into a manageable condition.

The event concluded with a call for continued connection and collaboration, emphasizing that progress for future generations depends on the momentum generated by the current community.

03/24/2026

Last week, we held an event called “An Evening of Hope” in honor of Rare Disease Day.

Speakers included rare disease advocates, researchers, patients, and community members who shared their personal stories, breakthroughs, and messages of hope.

▪️ Chief People and Impact Officer Erica Fox advocated for direct action, research, and community involvement to change outcomes for rare disease families.

▪️ Patients Oskar Szajnuk & Ava Szajnuk, with Rare and Undiagnosed Network (RUN) shared their long “diagnostic odyssey,” with over 60 syndromes and diagnoses among their immediate family without a definitive root cause or cure.

▪️ Kelvyn Cullimore, President and CEO of BioUtah, noted that Utah’s life sciences industry employs 180,000 people and contributes over $22 billion to the state’s economy.

▪️ Justine Case, a member of the Utah Rare Disease Advisory Council, highlighted the critical role of policy work to overcome systemic barriers, such as lack of insurance coverage and difficulties in receiving diagnoses.

▪️ Stacy Allen shared the story of her son’s battle with Cystic Fibrosis, describing the decades of parent-led advocacy and research investment that turned a terminal diagnosis into a manageable condition.

The event concluded with a call for continued connection and collaboration, emphasizing that progress for future generations depends on the momentum generated by the current community.

👉 Watch the full event here:

We’re headed to AACR!Recursion will be at AACR - April 17-22 in San Diego - sharing our breakthroughs in leveraging data...
03/19/2026

We’re headed to AACR!

Recursion will be at AACR - April 17-22 in San Diego - sharing our breakthroughs in leveraging data and AI to drive new cancer discoveries and treatments.

🔹 On April 18, 12:30pm, Teeru Bihani, VP of Translational Strategy at Recursion, will present as part of an educational session on “AI in Biomarker Discovery and Translational Drug Development” along with Jorge Reis-Filho, Chief of AI for Science Innovation at AstraZeneca. She’ll share details of Recursion’s AI-enabled cancer programs, including REC-1245, in which we used Recursion’s AI platform to discover the relationship between RBM39 and DNA damage response, and to design a potentially first-in-class degrader which is being developed for the treatment of biomarker-enriched solid tumor indications and lymphoma. The session will be moderated by Jakob Nikolas Kather of Dresden International University (DIU) Graduate School for Interdisciplinary Life Sciences.

🔹 On April 20, 9am-12pm, we’ll present a poster on CellNeighbor, a transcriptional atlas of patient tumors and cell line models to inform preclinical model selection. CellNeighor addresses the translational gap between cell line models selected for compound activity assays based on molecular profiles and the in vitro cell culturing that can influence genetic changes in these models. We built CellNeighbor by integrating transcriptomic profiles from DepMap with patient tumor data from The Cancer Genome Atlas and deidentified patient tumor data from Tempus AI, creating a unified transcriptomic map of cell lines and tumors.

03/18/2026

At the Leerink Partners 2026 Global Healthcare Conference last week, CEO and President Najat Khan and CFO Ben Taylor shared our key focus areas – from pipeline and partnerships to the critical importance of people.

They emphasized how we are moving past hype into the era of value realization. A few key takeaways:

🧬 “Simulate More, Make Less”: By leveraging our AI platform, we are drastically shifting timelines and costs associated with traditional drug discovery.

🤝 Partnership Value: “The most important thing is not partnership announcements but partnership value realization,” Najat said. We are incredibly proud of our progress with partners like Sanofi and Roche, and as Najat noted “we just crossed over half a billion in upfront and milestones.”

📊 Disciplined Capital Allocation & Portfolio Management: We treat our pipeline with an investor mindset, establishing rapid, data-driven go/no-go decisions for every program.

🧠 The “Bilingual” Talent Moat: Our success is built on a culture that equally values and integrates technology and biology, breaking down legacy pharma silos. “Innovation comes from the intersection of the two,” Najat said. “We hire folks that have the openness, like a drug hunter that has the openness to understand AI... And then AI scientists that actually want to learn about drug discovery.”

👉 Watch the full webcast here: https://event.summitcast.com/view/mT9poctHDNthc6b89WqVjf/Uu9Jby4mP4WTcucuq7PCon

Recursion welcomed rare disease advocates, physicians, patients, and community members for “An Evening of Hope” last wee...
03/10/2026

Recursion welcomed rare disease advocates, physicians, patients, and community members for “An Evening of Hope” last week at our headquarters in Salt Lake City. The event highlighted the critical work happening to raise awareness and accelerate new treatments and how to best support rare disease patients and their families who are waiting for a cure.

“Creating community is a powerful source of energy and stamina to sustain our work,” said Recursion’s Chief People and Impact Officer Erica Fox, who lost her son to a rare cancer when he was just 18.

“Let’s make sure this evening of hope is just the beginning, the beginning of a lifetime of good health for so many patients, their families, and their communities.,” said Kelvyn Cullimore, President and CEO of

A story in GeneOnline looks at the new “show the proof” era of AI drug discovery and how Recursion is delivering.“The qu...
03/06/2026

A story in GeneOnline looks at the new “show the proof” era of AI drug discovery and how Recursion is delivering.

“The question confronting AI drug discovery companies is no longer whether algorithms can generate hypotheses, but whether they can deliver clinical outcomes.”

The story looks at Recursion’s REC-4881 program for the rare disease Familial Adenomatous Polyposis (FAP), which is demonstrating meaningful results in patients in the ongoing Phase 2 trial. “In a sector often defined by computational ambition and platform potential, such data offers a more concrete measure of clinical progress.”

👉 Read more: https://www.geneonline.com/recursion-makes-the-unknown-known-in-rare-disease-drug-discovery/

TechBio

💡 How Recursion is helping to solve a key drug discovery bottleneck: ADMET prediction 📣 We recently announced the launch...
03/03/2026

💡 How Recursion is helping to solve a key drug discovery bottleneck: ADMET prediction

📣 We recently announced the launch of the ADMET Network with Apheris – a federated data network designed for pharmaceutical companies to collaboratively train models for absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity (ADMET) predictions without sharing proprietary data.

Other founding companies include: Lundbeck, Orion Pharma, and Servier.

👉 Read about the ADMET Network in GENBio: https://www.genengnews.com/topics/artificial-intelligence/admet-predictions-get-ai-boost-federated-data-network-unites-pharma/

AI

Tomorrow is Rare Disease Day – an important reminder of just how prevalent rare diseases remain and how critical it is t...
02/27/2026

Tomorrow is Rare Disease Day – an important reminder of just how prevalent rare diseases remain and how critical it is that we continue to leverage all of our tech tools and AI advances to find new treatments.

Rare diseases impact more than 300 million people worldwide – and 30 million in the U.S. – and just 5% of rare diseases have a treatment. Better approaches are needed.

🔹 On Tues., March 3, Recursion will host Utah Rare Disease Day at our Salt Lake City headquarters. We’ll welcome speakers from across the rare disease community – physicians, patients, and advocates – to share their stories of hope.

They include:
▪️ Erika Fox, Chief People and Impact Officer at Recursion
▪️ Oskar & Ava Szajnuk, rare disease patients with Rare and Undiagnosed Network (RUN)
▪️ Kelvyn Cullimore, President and CEO, BioUtah
▪️ Andy Roberston, executive director, BioHive
▪️ Justine Case, patient and advocate with Utah Rare Disease Advisory Council (RDAC)
▪️ Aaron Quinlin, professor at University of Utah
▪️ Sally Jo Zuspan, RN, MSN, director of research at University of Utah
▪️ Dr. Tracy George, president of ARUP Labs
▪️ Stacy Allen, parent and advocate at Intermountain Children’s Health
▪️ Januel Gomez, patient and Utah RDAC Council member

🤗 We’re looking forward to hearing from so many community members who are dedicated to raising awareness around rare diseases – and helping us to support patients and new treatments.

02/26/2026

Recursion CEO and President Najat Khan says the AI drug discovery industry is entering a new phase.

“It’s no longer about what models you build or about what collaborations you sign,” she says. “It’s about what you unlock that can actually drive better medicines, and Recursion is firmly pioneering that new phase.”

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41 S Rio Grande Street
Salt Lake City, UT
84108

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Our Story

Our dynamic team combines innovative biological science with advanced computational algorithms to discover new therapeutic opportunities for rare genetic diseases. We use high-throughput genetic manipulation to model many diseases in multiple human cell types quickly and efficiently. Thousands of cells representing each model are imaged using high-throughput automated microscopy. We use automated image segmentation systems to quantify hundreds or thousands of structural relationships in tens of thousands of cells for every disease we model. Our proprietary informatics approaches enable us to identify the critical disease-specific changes associated with each disease model. Once we have quantified the phenotypic fingerprint (phenoprint) for a disease, we model it en-masse in thousands of wells and evaluate the ability of thousands of drugs to rescue the disease-specific structural perturbations back to 'health'.