SALT LAKE CITY, May 1, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company that combines artificial intelligence (AI), experimental biology, and automation to discover drugs at scale, today announced it has hired Kevin Lynch, Ph.D., MBA as Chief Business Officer. Dr. Lynch joins Recursion after 22 years at AbbVie. He most recently served as the Vice President of Search and Evaluation, prior to which he served as Director of Licensing and Business Development.

Dr. Lynch joins Recursion during a rapid expansion in the company's drug discovery efforts. Over the past 12 months, Recursion has extended its therapeutic reach beyond genetic disease, into areas including immunology and inflammation, immuno-oncology, and infectious disease. Under Dr. Lynch's leadership, the company aims to vigorously expand its preclinical pipeline in these areas, among others, and to pursue strategic partnerships to accelerate the development of innovative new medicines for patients with indications of high unmet medical need.   

"Kevin is an enormous asset to our team. His decades of business development experience with an innovative organization such as AbbVie, and his extensive track record of in-licensing, collaborations, and strategic out-licensing will be invaluable as we drive our drug discoveries forward into the clinic," said Chris Gibson, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Recursion. "In addition, Kevin is passionate about bringing new treatments to patients, which is central to Recursion's mission of decoding biology to radically improve lives."

By applying advanced machine learning algorithms to a rapidly-growing dataset of more than one petabyte (equivalent to about 250,000 1080p movie files) of relatable biological images generated in-house on Recursion's discovery platform, the company is able to discover new chemical entities, predict mechanisms of action, reveal previously undiscovered biology, and map compounds to any disease that can be modeled in human cells. Through this massively parallel approach, Recursion aims to bring treatments to the clinic much faster and more cost-efficiently than previously possible.

"There's a lot of recent enthusiasm in the industry for the application of machine learning techniques to drug discovery and development, and for good reason. Given the right data set, which Recursion has uniquely built, these techniques have the near-term potential to massively improve the breadth of biology accessible to scientists, provide biologically meaningful insights into disease, and significantly reduce the time and cost of discovery and development," said Dr. Lynch. "I'm eager to work with Recursion, the world's leading team in AI-powered drug discovery, and I'm excited to work with collaborators and partners to drive these drug discovery programs forward."

About Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

Recursion Pharmaceuticals is a biotechnology company combining experimental biology and automation with artificial intelligence in a massively parallel system to efficiently identify and de-risk potential drugs for diverse indications, including genetic disease, inflammation, immunology, and infectious disease. Recursion applies causative perturbations to human cells to generate disease models and associated biological image data. Recursion's rich, relatable database of biological images is then probed using advanced machine learning approaches, revealing drug candidates, mechanisms of action, and potential toxicity, with the eventual goal of decoding biology and advancing new therapeutics to radically improve lives. Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City. Learn more at www.recursionpharma.com, or connect on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.