SALT LAKE CITY, May 15, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Recursion Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company that combines artificial intelligence (AI), experimental biology, and automation to discover drugs at scale, today announced that it has hired Phil Carpino, Ph.D. and Mike Genin, Ph.D., to direct chemistry efforts.

Dr. Carpino has more than 25 years of big pharma experience at Pfizer, where he specialized in metabolic diseases. He is an inventor of five drugs that entered human clinical trials, including capromorelin, a ghrelin receptor antagonist. In addition, he was the first to discover a new class of compounds, covalent positive allosteric modulators (cPAMs) of G-protein coupled receptors. Dr. Genin has also spent more than 25 years in pharma, working with world-class discovery groups at Pfizer, Aventis, and Eli Lilly. Most recently, he served as Group Leader, Senior Research Advisor at Lilly. He has advanced projects in diverse therapeutic areas, including infectious, cardiovascular, metabolic, and autoimmune diseases, and has delivered preclinical and clinical milestones across several target classes.

Drs. Carpino and Genin bring their enthusiasm for chemistry and track records of success in pharma to Recursion during a period of the company's rapid expansion. Recursion has broadened its programs beyond rare disease and into diverse therapeutic areas such as immunology and inflammation, immuno-oncology, and infectious disease. Drs. Carpino and Genin will empower the team to expand its pipeline through the development of novel chemistry, enabling Recursion's platform to fully realize its potential of discovering new targets in diseases of unmet need.

"I am ecstatic to have Phil and Mike on our team. Combined, they have more than half a century of chemistry experience, and each of them has a long list of outstanding accomplishments," said Martin Brenner, DVM, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer of Recursion. "They are both passionate about adding chemistry to Recursion's unique blend of automated experimental biology and artificial intelligence, and this passion will translate into new, effective treatments for patients."

The work of the new chemistry team will also dovetail with some of Recursion's most exciting technology, including Compound Intelligence, an AI-powered tool that makes predictions about previously untested compounds based on the effects they induce in human cells. Using Compound Intelligence, Recursion will be able to predict not only potential toxicity signals, but also mechanism of action and polypharmacology of compounds resulting from new chemical entity efforts. These advances have the potential to significantly reduce the time and costs required to advance compounds through lead optimization.

"Combining new chemical entity work with our Compound Intelligence capabilities and discovery platform has the potential to yield life-changing first-in-class drugs for multiple therapeutic areas at an unprecedented pace," said Christopher Gibson, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Recursion. "This kind of combination is what will enable us to cross the finish line on our goal of 100 treatments by 2025. We are eager to welcome Mike and Phil to our team. Together, they will create opportunities that have long eluded drug discovery."

About Recursion Pharmaceuticals

Recursion Pharmaceuticals is an emerging biotechnology company based in Salt Lake City. Recursion combines experimental biology and bioinformatics with artificial intelligence in a massively parallel system to quickly and efficiently identify treatments for any disease which can be modeled at the cellular level. From its initial and continued focus on drug repurposing to treat rare diseases, Recursion has broadened its platform to probe rich data from high-throughput automated screens for a number of indications, including aging, inflammation, infectious disease, oncology, and diagnostics. Recursion's ultimate vision is to leverage technology to build a robust and reliable map of human cellular biology, which would enable a radical shift in the pace and scale at which new treatments could benefit patients. Learn more at www.recursionpharma.com, or connect on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.