Recursion Bolsters Efforts to Industrialize Drug Discovery with Acquisition

Recursion said it has acquired the digital vivarium company Vium, an effort to extend its integration of advanced information technology into the drug discovery process.

Photo: Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Vium’s platform combines computer vision, machine learning and sensor technologies to non-invasively collect and derive insights from digital biomarkers in preclinical in vivo research.

“Technology is set to change the pace, scale, and cost of drug discovery over the coming decades. At Recursion, we are building a vast machine to rapidly discover drugs through the integration of technology at every step in the process,” said Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion. “Bringing the fantastic team at Vium in-house will enable us to build on our core technology and vision, augmenting our huge in vitro datasets with large, complementary in vivo datasets, and advancing our mission to decode biology to radically improve patient lives.”

Laura Schaevitz, CEO of Vium, said her team will focus on building a large in vivo data set for Recursion’s digital biology platform, potentially enabling an even broader pipeline of medicines.

“Recursion and Vium share a common vision that delivering better therapies to patients faster requires an industrialization of the drug discovery process,” she said. “We are transforming preclinical research through the creation of a scalable in vivo platform to collect continuous, high-quality datasets where traditionally researchers would have limited data available.”

Recursion is developing a pipeline of therapies for rare and other diseases. Its lead candidates are for neurofibromatosis type 2 and cerebral cavernous malformation. It has a pipeline of more than 30 discovery programs along with programs it is jointly developing with large pharmaceutical partners.

Author: Rare Daily Staff