Recursion Announces Multi-Year Collaboration with Mila for Tech-Enabled Drug Discovery

Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), a clinical-stage biotechnology company decoding biology by integrating technological innovations across biology, chemistry, automation, machine learning and engineering, today announced a multi-year collaboration with Mila, the Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, to accelerate Recursion’s machine learning capabilities.

“Recursion is executing at the forefront of multiple technical fields including biology, chemistry, automation, engineering and data science,” said Recursion Co-Founder and CEO Chris Gibson. “From operating one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, to approximately 35 per cent of our employees focusing on data science and software engineering, Recursion uses technology to drive insights into biology. This collaboration with Mila accelerates our research in machine learning alongside one of the leading institutes in the world.”

Recursion will open office space within Mila and build a team focused on using machine learning for tech-enabled drug discovery. The Montreal office will collaborate with the company’s first major multidisciplinary expansion in Toronto, in addition to its existing headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah and in vivo biology center in Milpitas, California. Mila’s AI ecosystem will allow Recursion access to a network of talented experts, who will work with Recursion toward its goal of radically improving the lives of patients and industrializing drug discovery.

“Mila and Montreal are renowned for a vibrant artificial intelligence community that is focused on meaningful, real-world problems,” said Recursion Chief Technology Officer Ben Mabey. “This ethos is highly aligned with Recursion’s mission to decode biology to radically improve lives. We are excited about deepening our relationship with this community and the city of Montreal.”

Recursion leverages machine learning to unravel complex patterns of biology within its more than 8 PB and growing proprietary biological datasets generated in-house at the company’s headquarters in Salt Lake City. The totality of Recursion’s infrastructure, data and software systems enable the company to drive the unbiased discovery of novel therapeutics at a pace and scale beyond what could be studied or explored in the physical world. Professor Yoshua Bengio, founder of Mila, has served as a scientific advisor for Recursion over the past four years, and is helping Recursion expand its machine learning capabilities. Currently, Recursion sponsors a postdoctoral fellow at Mila who is working in the area of causal representation learning with Professor Bengio.

“We are thrilled to welcome Recursion to Mila’s campus. By leveraging machine learning for drug discovery, the combined efforts of Mila and Recursion have the potential to scale up and ramp up the search for drug candidate molecules,” said Yoshua Bengio. “We look forward to contributing to Recursion’s technology-enabled R&D activities and maximizing the opportunity to revolutionize patient treatment and care.”

Learn more about Recursion and view open positions at Recursion.com/Careers.