Recursion and Google Cloud Announce Expansion of Partnership to Support Drug Discovery with Cloud and Exploration of Generative AI Technologies

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Oct 21, 2024, 08:00 ET

SALT LAKE CITY and SUNNYVALE, Calif., Oct. 21, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Recursion, a leading TechBio company decoding biology to radically improve lives, and Google Cloud today announced an expanded collaboration leveraging Google Cloud's technologies to support Recursion's drug discovery platform.

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Recursion's automated High Throughput Screening laboratory at its headquarters in Salt Lake City conducts up to 2.2 million experiments weekly.

This strategic partnership includes exploring generative AI capabilities, including Gemini models, to support the RecursionOS, drive improved search and access with BigQuery, and help scale compute resources. In addition, Recursion will also explore making some of its AI models available on Google Cloud. The enriched partnership supports Recursion's ongoing effort to tackle the biopharmaceutical industry's critical challenge of slow and costly drug development by reducing the time and cost involved in bringing new therapies to patients—ushering in a new era of accessible and affordable healthcare globally.

The average cost to develop a new drug has increased by 15% in the past year, reaching approximately $2.3 billion, according to Deloitte. This increased expense and time-to-market limits the number of new therapies available to patients and contributes to the rising cost of healthcare. Recursion is addressing this problem by leveraging its own proprietary datasets, and AI tools, compute power, and advanced technologies from Google Cloud to accelerate drug discovery research. By streamlining the drug development process and increasing its success rate, Recursion seeks to revolutionize the industry and bring new, life-saving treatments to patients faster and more affordably.

"Our partnership with Google Cloud supports the acceleration of our research with a goal of bringing new and better treatments to patients more efficiently," said Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO, Recursion. "We are pleased to have Google Cloud help us continue to push the boundaries of drug discovery and the development of new treatments for patients faster than ever before using their cloud infrastructure."

The two companies have a history of successful collaboration, working together for more than six years. To date, Google Cloud has provided infrastructure and services, including Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Compute Engine, Cloud storage of Recursion's massive datasets, and BigQuery, enabling Recursion to manage its biology and chemistry datasets, and complex computations involved in extracting insights from this data using its foundation models. This powerful application of AI has already accelerated Recursion's drug discovery, increasing the speed and lowering the cost to IND studies.

"We can help unlock the complexities of biology through the use of cutting-edge AI tools," said Thomas Kurian, CEO, Google Cloud. "Through our partnership with Recursion, we're supporting the discovery of novel therapeutics by combining Recursion's vast biological dataset and its own AI capabilities with the opportunity to explore our advanced AI and other technologies. Our goal is for this to not only deepen our scientific understanding, but also pave the way for a future where new treatments for complex diseases are developed faster and more efficiently for patients worldwide."

This expanded partnership will further enhance Recursion's ability to innovate and bring new treatments to patients faster, including:

Exploration of Gemini to support the RecursionOS and making some Recursion models available on Google Cloud: As Recursion's preferred AI cloud partner, the company will have access to Google Cloud's Gemini family of models. Recursion's team will explore Gemini's capabilities across multiple drug discovery efforts. In addition, Recursion will also explore making some of its AI models available on Google Cloud.
Search and access: By using Google Cloud BigQuery, Recursion will be able to query its industry-leading proprietary dataset at unprecedented speed. It will enable Recursion's team to quickly identify important data points from petabytes of data, improving the overall output and efficiency.
Scale resources: Recursion will be able to quickly deploy computing resources to run large inference workflows, bursting when needed beyond its current GPU footprint. This will allow Recursion to scale its computing resources and iterate on its models for drug discovery at an accelerated pace.
Managing petabytes of data: Google Cloud storage will serve as Recursion's main source of truth for its ever growing data set of proprietary biological data. With Google Cloud, Recursion will be able to effectively store, manage and transform information so its scientists, engineers, and developers can effectively locate and use needed datasets.
Continued data privacy and security support: Recursion meets rigorous data security, compliance, and privacy standards to manage sensitive and proprietary data at a large scale. In addition, Google Cloud customers own their data, and all customer data is encrypted by default.

About Recursion

Recursion is a leading techbio company decoding biology to radically improve lives. By leveraging advanced technologies and massive datasets, Recursion aims to build a next-generation biopharmaceutical company that can develop new drugs faster and more efficiently.

About Google Cloud

Google Cloud is the new way to the cloud, providing AI, infrastructure, developer, data, security, and collaboration tools built for today and tomorrow. Google Cloud offers a powerful, fully integrated and optimized AI stack with its own planet-scale infrastructure, custom-built chips, generative AI models and development platform, as well as AI-powered applications, to help organizations transform. Customers in more than 200 countries and territories turn to Google Cloud as their trusted technology partner.

SOURCE Google Cloud