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Recursion Pharmaceuticals is a biotechnology and data science company that combines biology with artificial intelligence for the discovery of drugs. Recursion takes microscopic images to build biological datasets
For diseases that can be modelled at the cellular level, Recursion uses automation in a massively parallel system to find potential treatments for disease. The initial focus was on repurposing existing drugs to treat rare diseases and has broadened to probe data for markers of inflammation, infectious disease and immunology. Recursion is using its technology to build a map of human cellular biology to increase the pace of discovering new treatments to patients.
Neural networks and other computational techniques will be used to identify changes in thousands of cellular and subcellular features associated with various biological perturbations. This approach, termed phenomics, is the large scale study of phenotypes, the study of how variations in traits are related to genetic and environmental factors. Dr. Yoshua Bengio, a pioneer of deep learning is advising on their AI strategy.
In 2018, an investigational new drug (IND) called REC-994 discovered by Recursion was FDA approved for clinical trials for treatment of cerebral cavernous malformation (CCM). CCM is a genetic disorder characterized by collections of enlarged and irregularly structured small blood vessels in the brain which alter blood flow and lead to symptoms like seizures, vision loss, hearing loss, paralysis, neurologic deficits and hemorrhagic stroke.
Recursion received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in spring 2018 to use its technology to discover new drugs to treat malaria.
