Utah startup on the fast track to finding drug therapies for rare diseases


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SALT LAKE CITY — A Utah startup has quickly made big strides in drug research. In just three years, Recursion Pharmaceuticals has found a way to put a time-consuming process on a fast track.

There is a sense of pride, optimism and excitement as Recursion CEO and co-founder Chris Gibson shows us around the ever-expanding company with its state-of-the-art labs.

"This is our automation area where we are doing something like 30,000 to 50,000 experiments each week," Gibson says.

At Recursion Pharmaceuticals, it is all about speed. Here, automation is accelerating the search for rare disease treatments.

Back in 2013 as a research scientist screening existing drugs that might be effective in treating a rare brain disorder, Gibson decided to pit computers against biologists in an effort to streamline the process.

Gibson talks about the results of that competition. "It ended up being the computer that was better at that one particular task of looking at thousands and thousands of images of millions and millions of cells."

Recursion's chief technology officer and co-founder Blake Borgeson was intrigued by the ideas his friend Gibson was pitching. "When Chris described to me how to potentially use images to capture this really rich information from biology very quickly, a kind of switch flipped in my head," says Borgeson.

Today, Gibson and Borgeson are putting software and science together to analyze cell images. The Recursion computers are scanning 24/7 for signs a drug can control or reverse deadly conditions.

"I just thought there was a massive opportunity here to potentially treat lots of diseases very quickly," Borgeson says.

In fact, in just three years, Recursion has isolated 20 potential drug treatments that are moving toward clinical trials.

"We desperately need to accelerate the speed of drug discovery," says Dr. Anne Carpenter, head of the Carpenter Lab at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

It was Carpenter's team that developed the software that is putting Recursion's research on a fast track. CellProfiler compares pictures of diseased cells with the same cells after drug treatment.

"We're in a new generation where automated image analysis software can identify cells just like Facebook can identify individual pictures of humans," Carpenter says.

It is the kind of technology that has turned a young woman's fear into hope. Utah teenager Ricki Jensen has a rare disease. "Just not knowing what the future is going to hold is frightening," she says.

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However, Jensen has a new outlook these days. "That's what is so great about Recursion. What is going on there is giving hope to me and others," Jensen says.

Jensen and other rare disease patients are featured on Recursion's "Inspiration Wall." They represent just a fraction of the 30 million Americans suffering from rare diseases. These are the people the company is working fast to help.

"It is something that makes me feel excited and enthusiastic when I get up every morning," Borgeson says.

And automation has not put any humans out of a job at Recursion.

"We are using computers to do things that humans are not capable of doing. And what that means is that we've grown in just the last year from about 12 people to 60 people now on staff," Gibson says.

Soon, the company will start screening drugs for more common diseases. The ultimate goal is to level the playing field for people of every genetic code.

"I think we have the technology or we will have the technology in the coming decades to make everybody healthy," Gibson says.

In fact, Recursion scientists are ready to begin pilot studies using their systems to screen possible drug therapies for viral infections, cancers, inflammation and aging.

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Sandra Olney

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