Recursion, Exscientia Merge AI Drug Discovery Companies

By Bio-IT World Staff 

August 8, 2024 | Recursion and Exscientia have entered into a definitive agreement to combine Recursion’s scaled biology exploration and translational capabilities with Exscientia’s precision chemistry design and small molecule automated synthesis capabilities. Recursion’s current pipeline focuses on first-in-class drug candidates within oncology, rare disease, and infectious disease and Exscientia’s focuses on best-in-class drug candidates within oncology. 

The new company will be called Recursion and will be headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah. and will combine staff from both leadership teams. Chris Gibson, Co-Founder and CEO of Recursion, will serve as the CEO of the combined entity. David Hallett, Exscientia’s Interim Chief Executive Officer, will be the new company’s Chief Scientific Officer. Two existing Exscientia directors will join the Board of Recursion following the closing of the transaction. 

Under the terms of the transaction agreement, which were unanimously approved by the boards of directors of both companies, Recursion shareholders will own approximately 74% of the new company and Exscientia shareholders will own approximately 26%, in each case assuming no additional issuance by either company before closing. 

According to the morning’s announcement, the combination would create a diverse portfolio of clinical and near-clinical programs that could have annual peak sales opportunities of more than $1 billion. Together, the two groups plan to advance significant existing therapeutic discovery collaborations with some of the most prominent biopharma companies in the world, including Roche-Genentech, Sanofi, Bayer, and Merck KGaA. There is an expectation of potential additional milestone payments of approximately $200 million over the next two years from both companies’ current partnerships.  

The merger will integrate both companies’ discovery platforms. Once integrated, they believe that the Recursion OS platform will enable the discovery and translation of higher quality medicines more efficiently and at a higher scale with a full-stack technology-enabled small molecule discovery platform, including hotspot analysis, quantum mechanics, molecular dynamics modeling, 2D and 3D generative AI design, and more. In addition, the companies hope to read out approximately 10 clinical trials in the next 18 months. 

Chris Gibson of Recursion commented, “We believe the proposed combination is deeply complementary and aligned with our missions to industrialize drug discovery to deliver high quality medicines and lower prices for consumers. Exscientia’s precision chemistry tools and capabilities, including its newly commissioned automated small molecule synthesis platform, will augment our tech-enabled biology and chemistry exploration, hit discovery and translational capabilities. I am excited to continue building the best example of the next generation of biotechnology companies. It still feels like we are just getting started.” 

David Hallett of Exscientia said, “Adding Exscientia’s best-in-class focused precision oncology internal pipeline to Recursion’s first-in-class focused pipeline spanning rare disease, precision oncology and infectious disease is highly complementary as we look to bring treatments to patients faster. We look forward to bringing our teams together and integrating Recursion's high throughput and target biology capabilities with Exscientia's highly scalable molecular design and automated chemistry synthesis capabilities to truly accelerate the discovery of better drugs for patients.”