Recursion Inks Agreements Acquiring Cyclica, Valence

KUALA LUMPUR, May 9 (Bernama) -- Recursion, a clinical stage TechBio company, announced it has signed agreements to acquire two companies in the artificial intelligence (AI)-enabled drug discovery space namely Cyclica and Valence.

“The strategic acquisitions of Cyclica and Valence add industry-leading capabilities in digital chemistry, as well as machine-learning and artificial intelligence, which combined with our large-scale automated wet-laboratories and supercomputing capabilities, enables us to deploy what I believe is the most complete, technology-enabled drug discovery solution in the biopharma industry.

“We look forward to showing the world proof of the compounding benefit of this full-stack approach through the rapid acceleration of our pipeline and partnerships,” said Recursion Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Chris Gibson in a statement.

Headquartered in Toronto, Cyclica has built two highly differentiated products in the digital chemistry space which will be integrated into the RecursionOS.

MatchMaker is an AI-enabled deep learning engine that predicts the polypharmacology of small molecules as the foundation for small molecule drug discovery, while Pareto Optimal Embedding Model (POEM) is a unique similarity-based property prediction model.

In contrast to other AI prediction models, POEM uses multiple types of molecular fingerprints to describe molecules, providing a much richer measure of similarity that leads to greater accuracy.

Meanwhile, Valence, which is headquartered in Montréal at Mila, is the world’s largest deep learning research institute, committed to unlocking the full potential of deep learning in the drug discovery process.

The company has pioneered the application of low-data learning in drug design, unlocking the ability to design differentiated small molecules with improved properties and function from datasets too small, sparse, or noisy for traditional deep learning methods.

Joining forces with Recursion’s Montréal deep learning research office, Valence will become an AI and machine learning research centre to be led by Valence Discovery CEO and Co-Founder, Daniel Cohen with continued advisory from Yoshua Bengio, deep learning pioneer and scientific advisor to both Recursion and Valence.

-- BERNAMA