AI drug discovery company Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX) has announced a $50 million private investment in public equity (PIPE) investment from computing technology giant NVIDIA. The company also announced plans to accelerate development of its AI foundation models for biology and chemistry, which it intends to optimize and distribute to biotechnology companies using NVIDIA cloud services.
Recursion plans to use its vast biological and chemical datasets to accelerate the training of foundation models for BioNeMo, NVIDIA’s cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery. BioNeMo was announced earlier this year as a cloud service for generative AI in drug discovery, offering tools to customize and deploy domain-specific biomolecular models at-scale through cloud APIs. Recursion anticipates using the software to support its internal pipeline as well as its current and future partners.
“Our collaboration with NVIDIA represents two best-in-class companies coming together to help solve one of the world’s most difficult challenges, drug discovery,” said Dr Chris Gibson, CEO of Recursion. “With our powerful dataset and NVIDIA’s accelerated computing capabilities, we intend to create groundbreaking foundation models in biology and chemistry at a scale unlike anything that has ever been released in the biological space.”
Recursion, which recently acquired Valence Discovery, says it aims to accelerate the development of new technologies for the biopharma industry, while simultaneously democratizing access to large-scale models that have maximum impact in drug discovery. The collaboration with NVIDIA will also help optimize and scale Recursion foundation models leveraging NVIDIA’s AI computing expertise.
“Generative AI is a revolutionary tool to discover new medicines and treatments,” said Jensen Huang, CEO of NVIDIA. “We are delighted to collaborate with Recursion’s world-class team, which is doing pioneering work in digital biology and chemistry with NVIDIA DGX and NVIDIA AI software to accelerate the development of the world’s largest biomolecular generative AI models and speed drug discovery for biotech and pharmaceutical companies.”
