Recursion Announces Options Exercise by Takeda and Extension of AI-enabled Drug Discovery Collaboration
January 7, 2019
From collaboration to licensing options in less than 18 months
SALT LAKE CITY–(BUSINESS WIRE)–lt;a href=”https://twitter.com/hashtag/AI?src=hash” target=”_blank”gt;#AIlt;/agt;–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 Limited (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,
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Contacts
Ron Alfa, M.D., Ph.D.
Recursion
press@recursionpharma.com
Jessica Yingling, Ph.D.
Little Dog Communications
+1-858-344-8091
jessica@litldog.com