Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC

AI for drug discovery through robotic phenotyping

Recursion Pharmaceuticals is a Salt Lake City-based drug discovery company founded in 2013 by Chris Gibson and Blake Borgeson based on technology developed at the University of Utah. Recursion uses a novel drug screening platform to efficiently reposition known drugs and shelved pharmaceutical assets to treat rare genetic diseases and other conditions. The company’s original focus on rare genetic diseases using a novel drug screening platform that combines experimental biology and bioinformatics in a massively parallel system to quickly and efficiently identify treatments for multiple rare genetic diseases, or any disease that can be modeled at the cellular level. The core of the approach revolves around high-throughput automated screening using high-content assays in human cells, which allows the near simultaneous modeling of hundreds of genetic and other diseases. Rich data from these assays is probed using advanced statistical and machine learning approaches, and the effects of thousands of known drugs, shelved drug candidates, and novel chemical matter can be investigated efficiently to identify those holding the most promise for the treatment of disease.