Recursion Pharmaceuticals

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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.

08/20/2025

🚀 Expanding access to data to accelerate AI drug discovery.

A new article in Future Medicine AI looks at the critical role that open datasets play in driving discoveries – and how academic research groups, government agencies, and pharma and biotech companies are coming together to build these datasets and enable more access.

🔹 These efforts include:

▪️ The AI Structural Biology Network which allows researchers to tap into pharma’s proprietary protein structure data to train AI models under a “federated learning” approach that preserves confidentiality and prevents proprietary information from being revealed.

▪️ Recursion’s six open datasets from its 65+ petabytes of proprietary data – the largest of these, RxRx3, is a more than 100 Tb dataset spanning over 17,000 genes (CRISPR knockouts of most of the human genome) and 2.2 million images of HUVEC cells.

▪️ The Billion Cells Project from the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative and others – which involves building a single-cell dataset of 1 billion cells to train AI models.

▪️ The OpenBind consortium – an £8 million investment from the UK government to generate more than 500,000 protein-ligand complex structures along with their affinity measurements. This new dataset would represent a 20-fold increase over all public data produced in the last half-century.

The article also looks at how Recursion and others are leveraging open source data to identify biomarkers (such as specific genetic mutations) that can inform the patient populations who will be most likely to benefit from a new drug in clinical trials.

👉 Read more: https://www.fmai-hub.com/how-open-data-is-fueling-the-ai-drug-discovery-era-2/

08/19/2025

An article in BiopharmaTrend.com highlighted our recent earnings report, including “progress on internal assets REC-1245 (RBM39 degrader) and REC-617 (CDK7 inhibitor), alongside a $7 million milestone payment from Sanofi for a partnered immunology program.”

🚀 As the article notes, progress in our discovery partnerships includes:

▪️ Sanofi has advanced four programs to milestone stage within 18 months leveraging Recursion OS 2.0’s capabilities.

▪️ In the Roche and Genentech collaboration, Recursion has created a trillion-cell iPSC-derived knockout phenomap for neuroscience and advanced multiple GI-oncology phenomaps.

▪️ Bayer and Merck KGaA partnerships continue with early oncology and target ID programs.

👉 Read more: https://www.biopharmatrend.com/news/recursion-reports-q2-2025-with-7m-sanofi-milestone-announces-clinical-updates-1329/

08/18/2025

What we mean by “One Recursion.”

🔹 Katherine Matsumoto, PhD, Communications and Culture Fellow at Recursion, shared her experience learning to overcome an overly competitive mindset to develop as a leader in this latest clip from our internal RXU series.

Katherine shared how in her early days at Recursion, she measured herself against colleagues and looked for opportunities to outperform them. But a chance encounter on the roadways with an aggressive driver who turned out to be a friendly colleague made her realize that the “me versus them” mentality was just a meaningless construct – and one that wasn’t serving her.

💡 “One Recursion” is about recognizing that there’s so much to be gained – personally and professionally – from recognizing that we are better together.

“I’ve seen the power of the 180-degree shift that can happen in my own mind,” she said. “So now I encourage people to build the bridge all the way to that person and cross it yourself all the way to the other side. Don’t wait for them to meet you half way.”

08/13/2025

Betting on Britain’s TechBio talent.

A new article in The Economist asks “What’s Britain good at?” and finds that in three areas – advanced manufacturing, life sciences, and technology – the country continues to show leadership, and “remains a place where ideas spark.”

Since our combination with Exscientia a year ago, Recursion has expanded our presence in Britain, with labs in Oxford and an office in London, and we’re investing heavily in UK-led innovation.

When it comes to life sciences, says Recursion co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson, “Britain is ‘well ahead of most of the U.S.’ when it comes to training scientists who understand biology and computation.”

That’s in part because Britain is home to 4 of the world’s top universities and “Cambridge sits in the center of the densest innovation cluster on Earth, according to the World’s Intellectual Property Organisation's Global Innovation Index.”

While Britain may not have the “data centers or computing power of the U.S. or China,” the article notes, it does have “deep expertise in machine learning, and firms eager to deploy AI.”

Read the article: https://www.economist.com/britain/2025/08/07/whats-britain-good-at

08/08/2025

💡 “It’s not a taller ladder, it’s an elevator.”

In this video, Lina Nilsson, PhD, Chief Platform Officer, shares what we mean by industrialization at Recursion. The video is part of our internal RXU learning platform which provides deep dives into our mindset, mission, and value drivers.

🔹 Industrialization Is an Entirely New Approach

Industrialization of drug discovery isn’t about improving processes by small increments, Lina says, but imagining an entirely new approach to the way medicines are created from start to finish, i.e., not a better candle, but a lightbulb. Not a taller ladder, but an elevator.

At Recursion, this push toward industrialization has meant a constant reimagining of the process at every stage, incorporating new AI and ML technologies, and increasing automation.

🔹 Better Understanding, Bigger Ambitions

“We started with brute force screens and then we got into this world of inference and not having to test all of the combinations,” she said. “We are making another leap now into active learning and more complex assays” and most recently “this whole leap to an end-to-end system.”

At Recursion, she says, industrialization is “an emergent property where our ambitions grow as we understand the problem better and better.”

08/04/2025

Recently, Anne Carpenter, a member of Recursion’s Scientific Advisory Board, spoke at the Aging Brain Initiative at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) about the importance of biology imaging in the age of AI.

She begins by noting how facial structure can reflect disease and how pediatricians can “often diagnose a disease with a single glance at a human patient’s face” because “structural changes indicate that something’s wrong functionally.”

The premise of her lab, she said, was to find a way to easily observe physical changes in cells that would indicate an underlying disease state. That led her to create a cell painting assay and cell profiling software that would allow for capturing and testing cell data at massive scale.

“If we can test cells at scale,” she says, “we can take samples, test drugs one by one by one. In a pharma environment, you can easily do the cell painting assay for a million compounds.”

In this way she notes, scientists can “identify drugs that can turn those cells healthy again.”

Anne’s approach was a source of inspiration for Recursion’s co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson, and she discusses in her talk how cell phenotypes — along with AI – can bridge the gap between what genomes, transcriptomes and proteomes are doing to drive diseases.

Using phenotypic maps, she notes, Recursion has “identified thousands of screenable image phenotypes and hundreds of potential therapeutics and launched multiple clinical trials.”

👉 Watch the full talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kP-G3jtCJSg&list=PLJG0u60zazOtRAwamVGhaJ6eGqh-HASvw

08/01/2025

🚀 Tracking the impact of Boltz-2.

A new article from CURE looks at how open-source datasets and tools like Boltz-2 are “unlocking powerful capabilities once limited to Big Pharma,” and allowing startups and researchers to “dramatically accelerate and de-risk R&D involved in discovering new medicines.”

Boltz-2 is an open source foundation model from Recursion and Massachusetts Institute of Technology that was trained on Recursion’s supercomputer and is the first to combine protein structure and binding affinity prediction, approaching the accuracy of physics-based free energy perturbation (FEP) calculations while being over 1,000 times faster and less computationally expensive.

Since its release in June, Boltz-2 has been downloaded more than 170,000 times by 41,500 unique users, and a number of companies – including Tamarind Bio, Rowan, deepmirror, and ReSync Bio – have already onboarded Boltz-2 to their platforms. Meanwhile, “NVIDIA announced software improvements that double Boltz-2’s speed and reduce memory requirements.”

👉 Read more: https://wewillcure.com/insights/therapeutics/how-public-data-are-fueling-the-next-wave-of-drug-innovation

07/31/2025

In a new paper in ACS Infectious Diseases, Recursion scientists look at how AI and automation are helping to tackle ongoing challenges in global public health by:
▪️ generating therapeutic hypotheses for diseases with limited pathogen targets
▪️ overcoming data scarcity for neglected diseases
▪️ streamlining clinical trials

In 2020, for instance, Recursion’s AI models predicted the efficacy of repurposed drugs to treat COVID-19. Subsequent clinical trials revealed that 9 of 10 molecules had been accurately predicted.

👉 Read the blog: https://www.recursion.com/news/using-ai-and-automation-to-improve-outcomes-in-infectious-diseases

👉 Read the paper: https://pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10.1021/acsinfecdis.5c00462

07/30/2025

Last week, at the AI x BIO Summit, hosted by Decoding Bio and
New York Stock Exchange, Recursion Chief R&D Officer and Chief Commercial Officer Najat Khan, PhD spoke with BiotechTV
about how we’re addressing three core drivers of the high failure rate in drug discovery using data and AI.

Namely:

▪️ Ensuring stronger efficacy predictions by leveraging data and AI to uncover deeper, systems-level insights into disease biology.

▪️ Ensuring safety and tolerability by using generative AI and active learning to design safer, more drug-like molecules.

▪️ Ensuring the right patients for clinical trials, leveraging AI to simulate trials before they start in order to pick the patients who are most likely to benefit.

🔹 Najat spoke about the advantages of Recursion’s proprietary, multimodal dataset and evolution from broadly mapping biology, to mining for insights.

“I remember when I did my PhD, it took 5-6 years to have a crystal structure that was relevant. Here, once you’ve created that dataset, you go from mapping to mining. You turn it into a search problem. Think about how much faster you can do discovery if you have the holistic map in front of you and you have AI agents searching.”

🔹 She also discussed how the latest AI tools allow us to rapidly refine the process of creating highly optimized molecules.

“I’m an organic chemist so I’m always thinking about the number and time and cost to get to the elite candidate. Today we’re synthesizing only 200 or 300 [molecules] per program, compared to the thousands it usually takes. That’s completely changing the game in terms of time and cost. Because you are simulating all this – using modules like Boltz-2 and other algorithms, you’re doing all of the triaging in silico and then you only make what you have true conviction in that doesn’t just have tight binding affinity, but is drug-like.”

👉 Check out the full conversation here: https://biotechtv.com/post/recursion-najat-khan-ai-bio-summit

07/29/2025

Join our (L)earnings Call on Tuesday, August 5.

Today Recursion announced that we will provide business updates and report our second quarter 2025 financial results on Tuesday, August 5, 2025 at 8:00 am ET / 6:00 am MT / 1:00 pm BST.

🔹 We will broadcast the (L)earnings Call livestream here on:
▪️ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/recursion-pharmaceuticals
▪️ X: https://x.com/RecursionPharma
▪️ YouTube: https://youtube.com/

👉 Submit questions for the (L)earnings Call here: https://forms.gle/ciFX2KbLfkAvh3Q87

👉 Read more: https://ir.recursion.com/news-releases/news-release-details/recursion-report-second-quarter-2025-business-updates-and

07/25/2025

“How do we tap the potential in these data sets that can truly unlock better trials for patients, reduce timelines, and improve the patient experience?"

These are the questions Sid Jain, SVP of clinical development and data science at Recursion, discussed in a new article from Dan Schell in Clinical Leader. They explore how the new Council for the Responsible Use of AI in Clinical Trials with Advarra, Recursion, Sanofi and Velocity aims to develop protocols for AI use cases, ethics, regulatory questions, and real‑world pilots.

Early deliverables, Sid notes, “could include a shared AI glossary, a typology of use cases, and reference models for validating AI tools — the same way IT systems are validated today.”

👉 Read more: https://www.clinicalleader.com/doc/clinical-trials-get-a-council-for-ai-oversight-0001

Address

41 S Rio Grande Street
Salt Lake City, UT
84108

Website

http://www.recursion.com/

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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'.