By finding better treatments using a novel approach:
Statistics show more than 90% of drugs that advance into clinical trials fail before they make it to the market. This failure rate disappoints patients who are waiting for therapy and incurs huge costs that drive up drug prices. We are taking a novel, data-first approach to finding new medicines. Our growing map of human cellular biology allows us to probe the complexity of disease and discover potential medicines by approaching drug discovery in a new way. This is the challenge we care so deeply about solving: finding better medicines and making them more accessible to the people who need them.
Driving down costs:
Historically, it has taken over ten years and an average capitalized R&D cost of approximately $2 billion per approved medicine to move a drug discovery project from early discovery to an approved therapeutic (Deloitte. Ten years on: Measuring the return from pharmaceutical innovation (2019)). We have leveraged our evolving Recursion OS to explore many disease programs to a depth sufficient to quantify improvements in the time, cost, and anticipated likelihoods of program success by stage, compared to the traditional drug discovery paradigm. With long timelines and high failure rates it’s no wonder those drugs become expensive for patients, payers and the system. We believe we can do better. By making R&D less of an art and more of a data-driven process, we aim to drive down uncertainty and in doing so, optimize the cost and speed of discovery.
Helping patients and those who love them:
We aim to radically improve the lives of patients and those who love them. We will swing for the fences to try to make a meaningful impact on millions of people and we have ambitious plans to decode biology and deliver new drugs to the patients who need them. As a company that got its start in rare diseases, we have seen firsthand how many patients — and their loved ones — find themselves in a dark situation, faced with a new diagnosis, and without an acceptable treatment path forward. We hope to give these patients light. By doing so we aim to help their families, friends, colleagues and communities see the light, too.
Sharing what we learn:
Recursion believes in the benefits of open-source science and that open-source data sharing drives value for us and society as a whole.
We published key findings from our platform related to COVID-19 to allow anyone to make use of the data, in the hope that the data would be useful in fighting the global pandemic.
In addition, we released some of the largest open-sourced biological datasets in the world, the RXRX series, under terms that allow for broad academic and non-commercial use.
Our contribution to a greater understanding of human biology is just as important as the medicines we advance.
