Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a Salt Lake City-based biotech firm, recently announced a multibillion-dollar partnership with Roche AG, a Swiss medicine and diagnostics major, and its U.S. affiliate Genentech, that may bring the firm billions of dollars in new income over the next decade.
The development comes after Recursion said on Monday that it has extended its relationship with Bayer AG, a European pharma titan, for work on fibrosis illnesses, in a transaction that might be worth more than USD 1 billion.
Both transactions cap off a year in which Recursion has been on a roll, raising nearly USD 500 million in an April public stock offering and unveiling plans to grow its Salt Lake headquarters building to nearly 100,000 square feet at The Gateway complex in Salt Lake City. According to the corporation, it has added roughly 200 employees in the last year, has a headcount approaching 400, and has open job advertisements for 100 roles.
Recursion claims it will get a USD 150 million upfront payment, and Genentech and Roche may launch up to 40 initiatives, each of which may generate more than USD 300 million in research and tiered royalties on net sales if successfully developed and commercialized.
The Recursion alliance, according to Roche’s global president of pharma partnering, James Sabry, is a first step toward bringing new technology to bear on the search for novel treatments to combat disease.
In a news release, Sabry remarked, “This partnership illustrates the potential of technology to change drug discovery and unveil previously undiscovered insights into complicated disease in an unbiased way.” “We’re thrilled about the potential of this relationship to assist accelerate the development of large-scale medications.”
Recursion has been focused on innovation since its inception in 2013, with the goal of upending the realm of clinical-stage drug research by fusing digital AI with robot-driven automation to transform how novel medicines are developed to combat some of the rarest and most difficult of human medical conditions.
Gibson and his co-founders developed Recursion’s novel approach as part of their PhD study. The method focuses on automating the formerly labor-intensive procedure of staring through a microscope to determine whether the effect of chemical compound on a diseased cell is positive or progressing it toward becoming a healthy cell.