Recursion Announces Options Exercise by Takeda and Extension of AI-enabled Drug Discovery Collaboration

January 7, 2019 |

2 min read

From collaboration to licensing options in less than 18 months

SALT LAKE CITY--(BUSINESS WIRE)-- Recursion, a clinical-stage biotechnology company that combines artificial intelligence (AI), experimental biology, and automation to discover and develop drugs at scale, today announced progress in its collaboration with Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Ltd (Takeda) to evaluate and identify novel preclinical candidates for rare diseases. In less than 18 months, this collaboration has resulted in the evaluation of Takeda preclinical and clinical molecules in over 60 unique indications, with new therapeutic candidates identified for over half a dozen diseases. Takeda has exercised its option for drug candidates in two rare diseases from these early results. Takeda and Recursion have also extended the partnership to enable additional discoveries to be made and evaluated by both teams. Financial details were not disclosed.

“We’re thrilled with the momentum this partnership has established in such a short amount of time, as we work towards our shared vision for what artificial intelligence in drug discovery can achieve,” said Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion. “Takeda is undoubtedly at the forefront of adopting this technological convergence, and it has been great to work with their team and to see their dedication to rigorous science and rapidly advancing programs for a range of unmet needs.”

Signed in October 2017, the collaboration centers around the use of Recursion’s unique AI-fuelled drug discovery platform to identify novel candidates for genetic diseases. The platform combines massive biological data generation at scale with state-of-the-art machine learning that can draw meaning from millions of microscopy images generated in Recursion’s laboratory with Takeda’s compounds.

Unlike most partnerships aimed at identifying one specific therapeutic opportunity, under this collaboration Recursion seeks to build a pipeline of rare disease indications at unprecedented pace, with the goal to move discoveries into the clinic more quickly, safely, and at lower costs than ever before.

About Recursion

Recursion is a clinical-stage biotechnology company combining experimental biology and automation with artificial intelligence methods in a massively parallel system to efficiently discover potential drugs for diverse indications, including genetic disease, inflammation, immunology, and infectious disease. Recursion applies causative perturbations to human cells to generate disease models and associated biological image data. Recursion’s rich, relatable database of more than a petabyte of biological images generated in-house on the company’s robotics platform enables advanced machine learning approaches to reveal drug candidates, mechanisms of action, and potential toxicity, with the eventual goal of decoding biology and advancing new therapeutics to radically improve lives. Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City. Learn more at www.recursionpharma.com, or connect on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.