On December 7, 2021, Recursion, a clinical-stage biotechnology company decoding biology to radically improve lives by industrializing drug discovery, development, and beyond, announced a transformational collaboration with Roche and Genentech, a member of the Roche Group. Recursion will work with both Roche and Genentech's R&D units to leverage technology-enabled drug discovery through the Recursion Operating System (OS) to more rapidly identify novel targets and advance medicines in key areas of neuroscience as well in an oncology indication. Under the terms of the agreement, Recursion will receive an upfront payment of $150 million and is eligible for additional performance-based research milestones. Under the collaboration, Roche and Genentech (combined) may initiate up to 40 programs, each of which, if successfully developed and commercialized, could yield more than $300 million in development, commercialization, and net sales milestones for Recursion, as well as tiered royalties on net sales.

The collaboration will leverage the Recursion OS, an integrated, multi-faceted system for generating, analyzing, and deriving insight from massive proprietary biological and chemical datasets. The OS, which brings together wet-lab and dry-lab biology at scale to further industrialize and digitize drug discovery, will be deployed to phenomically capture chemical and genetic perturbations in neuroscience-related cell types and select cancer cell lines. The resulting phenomics data, generated in Recursion's automated laboratories, will be analyzed by Recursion's proprietary convolutional neural networks to turn these data into mathematical representations of biology that can be leveraged to identify novel biological relationships and initiate and advance therapeutic programs. This dataset will be potentiated by extensive single-cell perturbation screening data from Roche and Genentech, and the parties will collaborate on new machine learning algorithms to generate highly granular maps of human cellular biology.

Recursion, Roche, and Genentech will leverage the insights generated from the collaboration's maps of human cellular biology to rapidly find and develop medicines against novel targets in neuroscience and the oncology indication for up to a decade or longer. Programs already underway at Recursion in oncology or neuroscience are not part of the collaboration and will be independently developed.

Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati represented Recursion in the transaction. The team includes Farah Gerdes, Nellie Brutocao, Myra Sutanto Shen, and Keith Klovers.

For more information, please see Recursion's press release.