Source: Recursion Pharmaceuticals
Pioneer of AI medicines Recursive pharmaceuticals said Wednesday that one of its experimental treatments had reached a major milestone.
Using its artificial intelligence-based drug discovery platform, Recursion was able to identify an area of biology to target for the treatment of solid tumors and lymphomas, match it to a drug candidate, and thereby gain regulatory approval to begin trials in less time than 18 months.
“We think this is really exciting evidence, not just for us as a company, but I think for the techbio industry,” said CEO and co-founder Chris Gibson in an interview with CNBC.
The Food and Drug Administration has approved an investigational new drug application for a Phase 1/2 clinical trial of an experimental drug candidate called REC-1245. The company said the potential market for this treatment could include more than 100,000 patients in the United States and the European Union.
The study will evaluate the safety and tolerability of REC-1245 and will begin in the fourth quarter of this year. Phase 1 data from the dose-escalation portion of the trial could be completed by the end of next year, the company said.
The drug will target RBM39, which Recursion says is functionally similar to a well-known but difficult-to-target marker called CDK12, to treat advanced, biomarker-enriched cancers such as ovarian, prostate, breast and pancreatic cancer.
“I think what's really exciting about this particular recursion program is that this small molecule and this novel target essentially emerged from the equivalent of Google search, from this giant map of biology that we've already created,” Gibson said was referring to the huge data sets that recursion has created over the last 11 years.
“This is the first program that has come out of this,” he continued. “It’s the first program that really leverages a lot of these new tools that we’ve developed in one unit.”
There is great hope that artificial intelligence can significantly speed up and make drug discovery more cost-effective by eliminating some of the time-consuming trial and error involved in testing and selecting drug candidates. But investors wanted to see that reality could live up to the hype.
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Recursion shares since the beginning of the year
Recursion, which counts Nvidia among its investors, saw its shares fall 38% in 2024. But the stock is still more than 60% below its 52-week high, which it reached in late February.
The company plans to merge with another AI drug discovery company To knowwhich means even more data can be used. The deal is expected to close early next year.
According to FactSet, most analysts rate Recursion stock as a Hold, but two analysts actually rate the stock as a Buy. Analysts' average price target of $10.14 implies a return of 64%.