Recursion, a clinical-stage biotechnology company decoding biology to by industrializing drug discovery, development and beyond through disruptive innovation, expanded its existing strategic collaboration in fibrosis with Bayer AG. This will now include Recursion’s inferential search capabilities based on its growing maps of human cellular biology, giving Bayer the ability to further accelerate the work already underway in expanding novel fibrotic hypotheses. Recursion and Bayer may now work on more than a dozen programs in fibrotic disease. All projects will remain subject to the previously agreed upon economics, where each potential program could generate more than $100 million in commercial milestones plus royalties on future sales.
 
Bayer will leverage the Recursion Map, a collection of actionable scientific insights derived from the application of machine learning solutions on massive relatable datasets, to explore hundreds of billions of biological relationships that span whole-genome genetic perturbations, hundreds of soluble factors, and hundreds of thousands of pharmacological perturbations. Inferred relationships of interest will be validated in Recursion’s wet-labs and digital vivariums to advance therapeutic hypotheses and generate data which is fed back into Recursion’s Operating System to improve future predictions.
 
“Our collaborations are centered around the goal of delivering better drugs to patients faster than we could on our own,” said Recursion Co-Founder & CEO Chris Gibson, PhD. “At Recursion, we believe inferential search is the future of drug discovery and have made key advances in this space. We have a deep respect for and trust in our colleagues at Bayer and are looking forward to including these new tools in our collaboration and potentially expanding the number of programs we go after together – all for the benefit of patients.”
 
“The speed and scale of progress made in a short period of time on a number of fibrotic disease models with our collaborators at Recursion has been impressive,” said Philip Larsen, Senior Vice President and Global Head of Research and Early Development at Bayer. “Fibrotic diseases are an important cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide. We look forward to the continued collaboration and adding inferential search to further accelerate our mission to deliver transformative therapies for patients with fibrotic diseases of the lung, kidney, heart and more.”