Episode 14: How Recursion Hopes to Harness the Big Picture View to Understand Biology’s Landscape

After ten years of working on a specific disease, Chris Gibson’s graduate school lab tested their treatment theory on an animal model. It not only didn’t work, it actually made the animals worse. The experience prompted Gibson to look into how other tools and techniques could be brought to bear on biological programs. And so he quit medical school to co-found Recursion Pharmaceuticals where he is now CEO.  In this episode, Gibson sits down with host Stan Gloss of BioTeam, about Recursion’s mission to decode biology, radically improve lives, and set big goals to innovate across every stage of drug discovery. “If you set goals that are easily achieved, you default to using tools that have been used in the past. The only way you can force yourself to use new tools is if you set goals that are very hard to achieve if not seemingly impossible,” Gibson said. He talks about the company’s use of ’omics technologies to answer the industry’s present and future questions, their highly automated wet lab with robots, and Recursion’s use of machine learning to understand biology as a complete system. Gibson also discusses the company’s purpose-built datasets and the culture-first approach that helps foster more agility relative to larger, older pharmaceutical giants.Links from this episode:  Bio-IT World BioTeam Recursion Recursion’s Vision for the New Shape of Drug Discovery    Bio-IT World’s Trends from the Trenches podcast delivers your insider’s look at the science, technology, and executive trends driving the life sciences through conversations with industry leaders.