Recursion and Exscientia, two artificial intelligence (AI)-powered drug discovery and development companies, have completed their merger to advance the industrialisation of drug discovery.
Exscientia is now a wholly owned subsidiary of Recursion and has ceased trading. It will be delisted from Nasdaq.
In August, it was announced that Exscientia shareholders would receive 0.7729 shares of Recursion Class A common stock for each share of Exscientia they owned.
As per the agreement, Recursion shareholders will own approximately 74%, while Exscientia shareholders will own around 26% of the combined company.
The merger creates a vertically integrated and technology-enabled, AI-powered drug discovery platform.
The combined pipeline will include over 10 clinical and preclinical programmes, with approximately 10 advanced discovery programmes.
Key assets include REC-617 for advanced solid tumours, REV102 for hypophosphatasia, REC-488 for familial adenomatous polyposis, REC-2282 for Neurofibromatosis Type 2, REC-4539 for small-cell lung cancer, and others.
The combined company has over 10 partnered programmes in oncology and immunology. To date, it has received around $450m in upfront and milestone payments.
These partnerships could yield up to $20bn in additional milestone payments before royalties, Nasdaq-listed Recursion said.
Recursion co-founder and CEO Chris Gibson said: “I believe the combination of the incredible teams and platforms at Exscientia and Recursion position us as the leader of the AI-enabled drug discovery and development space.”
The combined entity will enhance the Recursion Operating System (OS) into a first-in-class, best-in-class drug discovery and development platform. It will uncover new insights and lower the time and cost of discovery.
It will use Exscientia’s chemical design and synthesis methods, with over 60 petabytes of proprietary data from in-house generation and partners like Helix and Tempus.
According to Recursion, the platform will drive iterative loops of hypotheses and active learning from research to development. The goal is to create virtual cells, enabling clinical trials to be conducted at scale.
The enlarged firm will have around 800 employees, with headquarters in Salt Lake City and primary offices in Toronto, Montreal, Milpitas, New York, Oxford, and London.
Exscientia interim CEO and Recursion’s planned chief scientific officer David Hallett said: “With our combined strength of real-world proprietary data and the models we’ve created hypothesising, testing and learning in a continuous loop, we’re redefining the space by shrinking timelines and costs, identifying and optimising lead candidates faster than traditional methods.”
