Tina Marriott retweetledi
In an industry where over 90% of drug candidates fail, we are relentlessly working to find a better way to discover and develop new medicines.
A new feature in @WIRED from @vero_greenwood captures the high-stakes world of drug discovery, highlighting the progress we're making, and the patients who inspire our work. The story introduces you to some of the dedicated drug hunters at Recursion and beyond who are using AI to find new ways to tackle complex diseases.
It opens with the story of Peter Ray, senior director of medicinal chemistry at Recursion, who shares how his mother’s struggle with cancer drove him to become a medicinal chemist, to dedicate his life to solving the disease that took her life.
Ray, she writes, is “excited to show me a molecule he and his colleagues at Recursion have been working on.” A MALT1 inhibitor, REC-3565, “designed to interfere with the growth of blood cancer cells.” The drug, says Ray, now in Phase 1 trials and developed using Recursion’s AI platform, “wouldn’t have come by human design.”
Greenwood attended an event at Recursion’s London office shortly after the company’s combination with Exscientia where she notes “the pink-lit conference hall buzzed with news of an announcement made just days before by Recursion’s chief scientific officer. Molecule REC-617, developed by Exscientia, had been given to 18 patients whose terminal cancers had stopped responding to other treatments…. One patient — a woman with ovarian cancer that had come back three times — surprised everyone: She lived. She was still alive after six months of the treatment. Because the trial is blinded, no one at Recursion or Exscientia has any idea who this woman is… But in that room, she seemed to radiate with life.”
And, she adds, by using AI to develop this drug, only 136 molecules needed to be synthesized and tested in cells, increasing speed and reducing cost of what is typically a very slow and extremely expensive process.
Co-founder and CEO @RecursionChris, she writes, hopes “that Recursion is laying the groundwork for what drug discovery will someday be like across the industry.”
“If we’re doing this right, if we’re building a learning system, the next 10 drugs after that have a higher probability of success. Next 10 drugs after that, higher probability of success. We keep refining this thing,” he said.
👉 Read more: wired.com/story/artifici…
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