Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company decoding biology by integrating technological innovations across biology, chemistry, automation, machine learning (ML), and engineering, today announced the company has initiated investigational new drug (IND)-enabling studies for REC-163964, a first-in-class, small molecule toxin inhibitor for possible prevention of recurrent Clostridium difficile (C. difficile) infections and potential prophylactic use in high-risk patients.
REC-163964 is the first internally-discovered New Chemical Entity (NCE) development candidate identified by the Recursion Operating System and advanced to IND-enabling studies. This lead represents one of three structurally-differentiated candidates discovered by Recursion’s ML-enabled Operating System for the potential treatment of C. difficile.
“While we honed our operating system on known chemical entities, our substantial infrastructure buildout for NCE discovery over the past 18-24 months is bearing fruit. Our first internally-discovered NCE is on its way to the clinic to potentially join our four known chemical entities advancing to phase 2 studies,” said Co-Founder & CEO Chris Gibson, Ph.D. “Over the coming years, I expect a growing portion of our scaling pipeline will be composed of NCEs, thanks to our rapidly expanding in-house library of biological and chemical data, and our medicinal chemistry, digital chemistry, predictive ADMET and inferential search capabilities. All of our scientists and I are excited by the more than 165 billion inferences we are exploring today to build a 21st century biopharma company.”
About Clostridium difficile Colitis
C. difficile-induced colitis is a leading cause of antibiotic-related diarrhea and arises from the disruption of normal bacterial flora in the colon. Toxins A and B secreted by the bacterium, or TcdA and TcdB, are responsible for considerable morbidity, including severe diarrhea, colitis, toxic megacolon, sepsis and extended hospital stays, as well as potential mortality. The scientific literature indicates that more than 730,000 patients are diagnosed with C. difficile and 32,000 patients die as a result of it in the US and EU each year. Recurrence of disease occurs in 20-30% of patients who receive standard of care treatment. Such standard treatment includes antibiotic therapies which can further impair flora and lead to relapse.
About Recursion
Recursion is a clinical-stage biotechnology company decoding biology by integrating technological innovations across biology, chemistry, automation, machine learning, and engineering. Our goal is to radically improve the lives of patients and industrialize drug discovery. Central to our mission is the Recursion Operating System, which combines an advanced infrastructure layer to generate what we believe is one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing proprietary biological and chemical datasets. We combine that with the Recursion Map, a suite of custom software, algorithms, and machine learning tools that we use to explore foundational biology unconstrained by human bias and navigate to new biological insights. We are a biotechnology company scaling more like a technology company.
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