SALT LAKE CITY, July 10, 2018 /PRNewswire/ -- Recursion, a biotechnology company that combines artificial intelligence (AI), experimental biology, and automation to discover and develop drugs at scale, today announced the company has appointed Tina M. Larson as Chief Operating Officer. From global leadership roles at Achaogen, Genentech, and Roche, Larson has more than 20 years of experience in developing and manufacturing biopharmaceuticals for unmet medical needs. The medicines she has helped advance target a spectrum of serious illness including cancer, heart attack, stroke, cystic fibrosis, severe asthma, and drug-resistant bacterial infections.

Larson joins Recursion as the company announces the clearance of its first investigational new drug application with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. In addition, Recursion has built an extensive pipeline of therapeutic candidates in dozens of diseases with significant unmet need, which the company intends to advance to clinical development. Larson will be leading the company into a critical growth phase as Recursion enters clinical development of its lead program and continues to build fully verticalized pharmaceutical discovery and development capabilities. Under her operational leadership, Recursion will continue to have a strong focus on leveraging its technology in all forms whenever possible to improve the efficiency of the process and to gain unique biological insights.

Larson will be leading the company's technical operations, including its highly automated screening platform, core business functions like talent acquisition and human resources, as well as advancing the company's overall operational maturity as Recursion continues to grow. "Tina is an accomplished leader in the industry and known for building innovative technical operations for all aspects and stages of drug development and manufacturing. She has grown R&D capabilities, executed clinical programs, and launched successful commercial products," said Chris Gibson, Ph.D., Co-founder and CEO of Recursion. "Beyond her incredible achievements and experience, Tina's passion for innovation and her open and inquisitive personality uniquely qualify her to lead the growth of a technical powerhouse such as Recursion, with teams from data science, engineering, and automation to biology, chemistry, and clinical development all coming together around a common goal of industrializing the drug discovery and development process."

By applying advanced machine learning algorithms to a rapidly-growing dataset of more than one petabyte of relatable biological images (equivalent to about 250,000 1080p movie files) generated in-house on Recursion's discovery platform, the company can 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.

"Recursion has built one of the most important data sets to probe human biology and discover important, new medicines for patients who have few, if any, treatment options," said Larson. "I am impressed not only with Recursion's ability to find new drug targets through their mapping of human biology and disease, but also with their radical AI-powered approach to drug discovery and development. The pharma industry needs truly profound innovation to tackle the challenges of speed and costs in drug development, and I believe Recursion is leading the charge for change, which will not only benefit patients but also the entire healthcare industry."

About Recursion

Recursion is a clinical-stage biotechnology company combining experimental biology and automation with artificial intelligence methods in a massively parallel system to efficiently discover 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 more than a petabyte of biological images generated in-house on the company's robotics platform enables advanced machine learning approaches to reveal 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.

Media Contacts:

Ron Alfa, M.D., Ph.D.
Recursion
press@recursionpharma.com

Jessica Yingling, Ph.D.
Little Dog Communications
+1-858-344-8091
jessica@litldog.com