RECURSION ACCELERATES SHIFT TO TECHBIO FROM BIOTECH WITH NEW, UPDATED COLLABORATIONS

KUALA LUMPUR, Nov 10 (Bernama) -- Recursion, a clinical stage TechBio company, announced two significant updates with their collaborators NVIDIA and Bayer, and a new collaboration with Tempus Labs as it creates infrastructure and expands its ambitions and scope in the precision oncology space.

In a statement, Recursion co-founder and chief executive officer, Chris Gibson said with Tempus’s 20 petabytes of fit-for-purpose precision oncology data, NVIDIA’s support and updating its collaboration with Bayer, the company will continue to drive the transformation from BioTech to TechBio together.

Recursion has come to an agreement with Tempus for preferred access to one of the world’s largest proprietary, de-identified, patient-centric oncology datasets, to support the discovery of potential biomarker-enriched therapeutics at scale through the training of causal artificial intelligence (AI) models.

By combining the forward genetics approach of Tempus with the reverse genetics approach at Recursion, the company believes it has an opportunity to improve the speed, precision and scale of therapeutic development in oncology.

As part of the agreement, Recursion will pay Tempus up to US$160 million in cash or equity over the next five years in exchange for continued and updated data access and use rights for therapeutic development purposes. (US$1=RM4.72)

In aggregate, Recursion will now have access to approximately 50 petabytes of proprietary data across biology and chemistry as well as real-world, patient-centric data that is relatable and fit for the purpose of training large-scale AI/machine learning (ML) models.

Meanwhile, to accelerate the impact of the Recursion’s proprietary data, the company has committed to substantially expanding BioHive-1, its on-premise NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD-based supercomputer.

This greatly expanded compute power will support the company’s pipeline, partnerships, and the construction of one of the largest foundation models of its kind across multiple modalities of biology and chemistry.

Based on the June 2023 TOP500 list, Recursion projects that upon completion and benchmarking, BioHive-1 will likely be in the top 50 most powerful supercomputers worldwide across any industry, owned and operated by any biopharma company, while the company anticipates the enhancement of BioHive-1 to be operational in the first half of 2024.

In addition, Recursion also announced an updated collaboration with its established partner, Bayer, for a select set of precision oncology programmes, allowing Bayer to leverage Recursion’s state-of-the-art capabilities to identify novel targets and chemistry applicable to oncology indications.

-- BERNAMA