Recursion

San Francisco, we’re coming for you in November! Altitude Lab is taking 15-20 BioTech startups from Utah and underserved regions on the road, connecting them with distributors, biopharma partners, and strategic investors. This is the first stop of Altitude Lab’s commercialization roadshow program, Horizon. Join us on November 7th for a pivotal event co-hosted with the Healthcare Businesswomen’s Association, featuring a panel discussion on "BioTech Frontier: AI and Emerging Startups." We're thrilled to have Neda Razavi, MBA from iSono Health, Marc Martin Casas from Illumina Ventures, and Shafique Virani, MD FRCS from Noetik sharing their insights on the future of BioTech and AI innovation. Along with the panel discussion, the event will offer exclusive networking opportunities with top industry leaders, providing a chance to connect with potential partners, investors, and mentors. The poster session will highlight rising BioTech founders from Altitude Lab's portfolio, showcasing breakthrough innovations in healthcare and biopharma. Registration is now open—grab your spot before it fills up! https://lnkd.in/dRaZU6ic #bayareabiotech #sanfranciscobiotech #biotech #californiabiotech #utahbiotech  #healthcaretech #lifesciencestartup #research #hbasanfrancisco

“I think what’s really exciting about this particular program of Recursion is that this small molecule and novel target came out from essentially a Google-search equivalent, from this giant map of biology that we’ve already built.” – Chris Gibson A story from Christina Cheddar Berk in CNBC highlights REC-1245, the first program from our AI-enabled Maps of Biology to receive FDA IND clearance for Phase 1/2 clinical trials – and which progressed from target identification to IND clearance in less than 18 months, more than twice the speed of industry average. She writes: “Recursion was able to use its artificial intelligence-enabled drug discovery platform to identify an area of biology to target for the treatment of solid tumors and lymphoma, match it with a drug candidate and move all the way to gaining regulatory approval to begin studies in less than 18 months.” “We think that’s a really exciting proof point, not only for us as a company, but I think for the techbio industry as well,” Chris said. 👉 Read more: https://lnkd.in/er77crJv #ai #ml #techbio #drugdiscovery #cancer #biology #maps #ind

Announcing FDA IND clearance for a Phase I/2 clinical trial of REC-1245 – Recursion’s first program to reach clinical studies that derived from our AI-enabled Maps of Biology, resulting in target identification to IND enabling studies in under 18 months. ◾ REC-1245 is a potentially first-in-class, potent and selective RBM39 degrader for the treatment of biomarker enriched solid tumors and lymphoma. ◾ Preclinical data supports that RBM39 degradation induces splicing defects which downregulate DNA Damage Response (DDR) networks and cell cycle checkpoints. ◾ The Recursion AI-Enabled Breakthrough to discover RBM39: Using our AI-enabled Maps of Biology – which allow us to screen millions of predicted biological and chemical relationships – we identified RMB39 as a novel target which looks functionally similar to the well-known but hard to drug target CDK12 ◾ Key Differences in RBM39 vs CDK12  CDK12 is a well-known, yet challenging, cancer target. Many investigational drugs designed to target CDK12 unfortunately also inhibit structurally similar CDK13, resulting in significant toxicity. We leveraged the Recursion OS, exploring predicted relationships across the entire genome and chemical compounds to identify the novel target relationship of RBM39, which our maps suggest has similar biological function to CDK12. Using our platform, we then identified and optimized small molecules, including our candidate molecule REC-1245, that targets RBM39 and has similar effects to loss of CDK12 without affecting CDK13. ◾ Significantly Faster than Industry: We progressed from target discovery to IND enabling studies (the step before potential clearance to enter the clinic) in under 18 months – more than twice as fast as the industry average. ◾ The Phase 1/2 clinical trial will evaluate the safety, tolerability, pharmacokinetics, pharmacodynamics, and potential monotherapy efficacy of REC-1245, and is expected to initiate in Q4 2024. We estimate that the initially addressable population for this potential therapeutic will be >100,000 patients in the US and EU5. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gkX2TzzT Watch our video about REC-1245 here: https://lnkd.in/gzzMGgHS #techbio #biotech #ind #ai #ml #drugdiscovery #target #cancer #cdk12 #rbm39 #automation

Unlocking a new area of application for ML in cell biology. In a new preprint, researchers from Valence Labs, Recursion’s research arm, reveal MolPhenix, a foundation model that can predict the effect of any given molecule and concentration pair on phenotypic cell assays and cell morphology. ◾ While multimodal approaches such as Dall-E, Sora, and Gemini have unlocked incredible new capabilities in NLP and computer vision, applying these approaches to molecular biology has been more challenging. Typically, multimodal representation learning techniques rely on paired samples to learn common representations, but paired samples are difficult to collect in biology where measurement devices often destroy the samples. (see here: https://lnkd.in/evn_BzBp) ◾ To train a model with biological data, one method is to link specific molecular perturbations with corresponding high-throughput morphology experiments. But there are still issues to overcome: 1) generalization across microscopy images remains challenging;  2) most molecules are inactive and will not produce any distinguishable effect;  3) concentration changes the outcome. ◾ MolPhenix, a molecular phenomics model, addresses these three challenges by: 1) Pre-training using foundation models like Phenom-1, simplifying the images into vectors, removing batch effects by normalizing with controls, and further reducing noise levels by averaging multiple replicates of the same experiments. 2) Leveraging the activity landscape with the help of a foundation phenomics model and the proposed S2L loss and defining an activity landscape to help over-sample the active molecules and adapt the loss function. These training modifications allowed them to consider pairs to be negative if their activity landscape is different. 3) Conditioning the loss and the molecular model on the dose. 👉 Read the paper here: https://lnkd.in/ekeMTSzj And check out the related article! 👇 Congrats to the team! Philip Fradkin, Puria Azadi Moghadam, Karush Suri, Frederik Wenkel, Ali Bashashati, Maciej Sypetkowski, Dominique Beaini #ai #ml #foundationmodel #molphenix #molecules #tech #techbio #drugdiscovery #biology

Today we are honoring Rare Cancer Day. A core Recursion value is "We Care," and that includes support for our patient communities and those impacted by the diseases in which we work. In support of our oncology programs and cancer patients we are beginning new patient advocacy partnerships with the Rare Cancer Coalition and the American Cancer Society. Learn more about rare cancers at National Organization for Rare Disorders: https://lnkd.in/eh2gwb8J #cancer #RareCancerDay #rarecancer

Few people understand the TechBio transformation of pharma like Najat Khan, PhD. Here, 90 days into her new role as Chief R&D and Chief Commercial Officer, having previously led the data science and AI team at J&J, she sat down to talk about what motivates her, why she made the leap from pharma to TechBio, and why AI drug discovery and development is ready to deliver. ◾ Talk about your transition from a leading data science and AI initiatives at J&J to joining Recursion. It is a big transition, but if you look at my career, I have always made transitions. It stretches me, and helps me learn and grow. Look at what’s happening in the TechBio space. Look at the amount of new insights coming in this space. I am excited to be part of that team, to drive them better, faster, so that TechBio is a name that everybody recognizes is the future of how we make medicine. And the future isn’t far, it’s here and now. ◾ What are you excited about when you look at Recursion’s pipeline? Up to 10 clinical trial readouts in 18 months – that’s big. But on top of that, it’s also what’s happening in the early-stage pipeline. The flywheel effect that we’re seeing – the intersection of the digital maps, novel chemistry, the molecules we’re making, how we’re automating DMPK and bringing new assets to the clinic – it’s supremely exciting. And these are all novel targets – which means these have the potential to be medicines that are first in class. ◾ What do we need to scale AI drug discovery and transform the industry? To solve this problem in an effective way you need really high quality data, compute has to be through the roof, and you also need really effective machine learning models. And it’s not just one of them that’s enough, integration of all of that is what’s becoming real. You now see how multi omics are coming online. How genetic medicines are having 2x the probability of success – all of that is coming from high-dimensional data coupled with algorithms. And, this is why I’m excited to be at Recursion, compute that is the fastest in the pharma industry. That’s what’s going to be the game changer. ◾ Why is it so important to have bilingual talent and a bilingual culture? It’s essential to have integrated teams. For me, I always had chemists and an AI expert. Or a technologist and a biologist. I think empowerment matters. And that’s how I empower people to come together. I see a lot of that at Recursion. It’s built with bilingual talent and culture. The “one Recursion” mindset. The mission. And the respect towards both disciplines no matter what your starting point was. #techbio #mindset #culture #bilingual #pharma #AI #datascience #drugdiscovery

“There’s a revolution going on right now in how we use images.” Recursion’s research arm, Valence Labs, recently released a series of videos from their Machine Learning for Drug Discovery Summer School at Mila - Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute which featured an array of experts teaching topics like protein folding, LLMs in drug design, and causal discovery. Among them is a talk on “Phenomics in Drug Discovery – Microscopy and Machine Learning” from Anne Carpenter, Senior Director of the Imaging Platform at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard and one of our Scientific Advisory Board members. It’s a topic of particular relevance to us, as Recursion’s earliest discovery – a new potential treatment for the devastating rare disease cerebral cavernous malformation now in Phase 2 trials – arose from work done with Carpenter’s early software for profiling cell images. In the talk, Carpenter describes why looking at phenomics – the outcome in a biological system – is such a powerful tool for drug discovery. By examining the state of human cells under various diseased and healthy conditions, it provides insight into how these changes might present in humans. And it allows us to run experiments at massive scale, vastly speeding up the discovery process at manageable cost. The process begins with multi-well plates that are equivalent to 384 tiny test tubes – each with different cells and compounds. The bottom of these plates are transparent and robot microscopes work around the clock to provide millions of images per week. Next, the images need to be analyzed using machine learning. She wrote one of the earliest software programs for this process, CellProfiler. Recursion has now developed our own machine learning foundation model called Phenom, a vision transformer utilizing hundreds of millions of parameters trained on billions of biological images from our proprietary phenomics library that we continue to scale.  While deep learning has transformed the drug discovery process, she says the remaining hurdle was generalizability – ensuring that the model can perform equally well on different datasets. Now, with Phenom and other models, that hurdle, too, has been overcome. Learn more:  👉 Anne Carpenter Phenomics in Drug Discovery: https://lnkd.in/e4gqs5RV 👉 Full ML in Drug Discovery Summer School playlist: https://lnkd.in/eAmDN-2N #ai #ml #drugdiscovery #techbio #phenomics #cells #imaging

Exciting news! Altitude Lab has been selected as a Stage Two winner of the Growth Accelerator Fund Competition through the U.S. Small Business Administration for sustainability and biotechnology! This grant will directly support Horizon, our commercialization partnering program, designed to accelerate the growth of life science startups. With this funding, we’re ready to empower innovative companies, foster biotech breakthroughs, and advance the future of healthcare. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue driving innovation and transforming the healthcare landscape. Check out more information here: https://lnkd.in/grqi8Htp #Innovation #Biotech #Healthcare #SmallBusiness #Horizon #AltitudeLab #Entrepreneurship #GrowthAccelerator #Sustainability

🎤 Live from Italian Tech Week! Chris Gibson participated in a Fireside Chat today with Morgan Samet, co-head and managing partner of Lingotto at the sold out Italian Tech Week in Torino, discussing “From Pixels to Pills: Writing AI’s Journey in Revolutionizing Healthcare.” They talked about the challenges faced by the pharmaceutical industry, including slow speed, high cost, and poor success rates, and how Recursion is leveraging AI to transform the drug discovery and development process, combining high throughput biology with advanced computational methods to overcome industry inefficiencies. Other featured speakers include Sam Altman, Jeannette zu Fürstenberg, and John Elkann. 👉 https://lnkd.in/dMQBmUGk #AI #ML #techbio #pharma #ItalianTechWeek

TechBio needs AI. Stephen MacKinnon, PhD, VP of Applied Machine Learning, is presenting a keynote talk "High-Dimensional Drug Discovery: How TechBio Needs AI" at the Ray Summit, happening Sept. 30-Oct. 2 in San Francisco. ▪ Stephen will share insights into how Recursion generates large quantities of information-rich proprietary data that needs AI to process – allowing us to take human interpretation and human bias out of the loop.    ▪ The Ray Summit is hosted by Anyscale and features tech leaders, engineers, developers, ML practitioners and others from across industries. ▪ Other keynote speakers include Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, Marc Andreessen Co-Founder & General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz and Brandon Leonardo, cofounder of Instacart. 👉 Learn more and register: https://lnkd.in/gWTKRzwc #RaySummit #AI #ML #techbio