Creation of the World's First "Neuromap" by Utah-based Recursion Pharmaceuticals Triggers a $30 Million Payment from Roche and Genentech

Through a LinkedIn post (of all things), Salt Lake City, Utah-based Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:RXRX) announced Tuesday afternoon (06 August 2024) that it has created the world's first neuroscience "phenomap."

As published by Recursion in the Form 8-K it filed Tuesday with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Recursion's creation of this neurological "neuromap" has been optioned by leading pharmaceuticals firm, Genentech, under terms of a 05 December 2021 Collaboration and License Agreement with F. Hoffmann-La Roche and its subsidiary, Genentech.

As a result, the two parties have paid Recursion a $30 million Acceptance Fee.

According to a post on his LinkedIn profile, Recursion CEO and Co-Founder, Chris Gibson, Ph.D. wrote,

"Huge day for Recursion and for neuroscience - so proud of our team for doing so many world firsts to achieve this and so excited to be working with the exceptional teams at Roche and Genentech to make great strides towards new neuro targets!"

For readers unaware, the entire thesis behind the 2013 formation of Recursion is that the power of supercomputers can be combined with customized artificial intelligence software (AI) n, massive biological datasets, and large learning models (LLMs) to rapidly and less expensively identify new drug candidates.

That's the Recursion premise.

As a result, Recursion has now

• Raised hundreds of millions of dollars in private monies,
• Entered the public market in an April 2021 Initial Public Offering,
• Conducted a subsequent secondary offering this June.

In the meantime,

• Recursion has partnered with some of the world's leading pharma / biopharma firms (like Genentech and Roche), and
• Technology companies (like NVIDIA),

all with the end goal of addressing and (if possible) curing some of healthcare's most challenging diseases and conditions.

The 2021 Recursion + Genentech + Roche Collaboration

As noted above, Recursion announced on 05 December 2021 what its news release headline described as a

"... Transformational Collaboration with Roche and Genentech in Neuroscience and Oncology, Advancing Novel Medicines to Patients Using Machine Learning and High Content Screening Methods at Scale to Map Complex Biology."

This partnership was described in the 2021 news release as a collaboration "... worth several billion dollars ..." designed to "... identify novel targets and advance medicines in key areas of neuroscience as well as in an oncology indication."

Recursion received an upfront payment of $150 million this collaborators, with "... Roche and Genentech (able to) initiate up to 40 programs ... (with Recursion), which "... could yield more than $300 (million) in development, commercialization and net sales milestones (for Recursion)."

The collab intended to leverage the RecursionOS to

• "Generate, analyze and derive insight from massive proprietary biological and chemical datasets (and turn them into) ...
• "Mathematical representations of biology (to) ...
• "Collaborate on new machine learning algorithms to generate highly granular maps of human cellular biology."

In other words, the intent was for Recursion to create neuromaps (aka, phenomaps).

Or as it said in the 2021 news release, the three parties agreed to

"... collaborate on new machine learning algorithms to generate highly granular maps of human cellular biology."

Sounds like that's exactly what they've done. Craziness!

Hence, the $30 million payout from Genentech/Roche announced yesterday.

In Recursion's LinkedIn post Tuesday, Dr. Gibson is quoted saying:

"With this map, and together with our partners, we now can navigate and evaluate potentially novel neuroscience targets at a breadth and scale that is unprecedented.

”We look forward to initiating new programs and building more maps on the forefront of the field with our colleagues at Roche and Genentech.”

The Recursion post on LinkedIn closed with the following statement:

"Neurological conditions are a leading cause of poor health and disability worldwide and have posed unique challenges for scientists due to lack of genetic patient data, poor understanding of underlying pathologies, and the difficulty of designing drugs that can safely cross the blood-brain barrier."

As such, major props to Team Recursion for what appears to be a major biotech achievement and advancement.

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