Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:RXRX) Chief Financial Officer Ben Taylor outlined the company’s integrated approach to AI-enabled drug discovery and development, recent portfolio decisions, partnership economics, and cash runway during a fireside chat hosted by KeyBank healthcare tech equity analyst Scott Schoenhaus.
Combining AI-driven biology, chemistry, and clinical execution
Taylor, who joined Recursion through the merger with Exscientia about 18 months ago, described how the combined company aims to address multiple points of failure in drug development. He said Exscientia brought strengths in using AI for chemistry, including multi-parameter optimization that considers not only potency and selectivity, but also absorption, metabolism, and toxicity-related properties.
He said Recursion has built a “phenomic system,” using approaches that include transcriptomics and real patient data, to identify targets and hypotheses. A third pillar, built inside the combined company, is what Taylor called the “ClinTech” business, which uses real-world data to support patient selection and clinical trial optimization. He cited improvements in enrollment rates of 30% to 60% through changes in how sites and patients are identified.
Portfolio consolidation and internal focus
Taylor said the merger created a very large combined R&D footprint, including “about 10 clinical agents” plus additional preclinical programs, which he characterized as too broad for the company to advance on its own. He said Recursion conducted a “ground up” review weighing scientific rationale, clinical plans, commercial opportunity, differentiation, and whether the company’s platform could materially increase the probability of success.
As a result, he said Recursion reduced its internal clinical focus to five programs in the clinic and has “about 15 programs in discovery” across internal and partner efforts. Taylor also noted that Recursion has brought in “over $500 million” from partners, which helped support the overall strategy while keeping internal capital constraints in mind.
Partnerships with Sanofi and Roche: milestones, economics, and risk balance
Taylor highlighted partnerships as a key part of the business model, naming Sanofi and Roche as the main partners and noting smaller collaborations with Bayer and Merck KGaA. He said Recursion achieved initial milestones on five programs with Sanofi, reflecting targets or programs that had been challenging for the industry to solve due to factors such as druggability, side effects, or first-in-class biology.
He described the development-candidate milestone as particularly attractive because it ends Recursion’s operational obligations on the program, making the milestone “all profit” that “drops to the bottom line.” Taylor said the company expects these partnership programs to continue expanding and described what he characterized as strong overall economics, including average program milestones of about $300 million and average royalties in the “high single, low double digits.” He also said that for Sanofi, $193 million of the average milestones are pre-commercial.
On the Roche relationship, Taylor said the work began in neuroscience and included what he described as “first of their kind” maps of neurological cells. He said Roche paid $150 million up front and that Recursion has received $60 million in milestones tied to success on these maps. Taylor said the goal is to convert this work into programs that resemble the Sanofi model over time.
He also stressed the importance of balancing internal and partnered efforts, noting that the partner pipeline has different disclosure limitations and a different risk and timing profile compared to Recursion’s internally controlled portfolio.
Clinical pipeline: FAP proof-of-concept and upcoming data
Taylor said the company recently reported a positive proof-of-concept readout in its most advanced program in an orphan indication he referred to as FAP. He stated the study showed “near 50% responses after only three months,” with responses that were “durable, even off drug.” He estimated there are about 50,000 patients across the U.S. and EU5 and said there is “no therapy that’s approved” for the condition.
Recursion is discussing the pathway for a pivotal trial with the FDA, Taylor said, and expects additional data in the first half of next year alongside initiating the pivotal study. He added that the company’s other four clinical programs are expected to have data between now and the first half of next year, and framed the upcoming readouts as tests of whether the platform’s preclinical problem-solving translates into clinical benefit.
ClinTech and capital runway through early 2028
Taylor said Recursion uses real-world data from more than six providers, including sources such as clinical trials and claims, to model likely responders and find patients for enrollment. He reiterated that the company has seen 30% to 60% improvements in enrollment rates when applying these methods. He also noted that clinical trials account for “70 cents out of the dollar” in drug development and argued better patient selection and trial design can reduce patient counts, time, and costs.
On the balance sheet, Taylor said Recursion ended the year with $754 million in cash, which he said provides runway into early 2028. He added that, when the companies combined, they were collectively spending over $600 million per year in 2024 and that Recursion reduced spending by more than $200 million in the first 12 months while expanding capabilities. Taylor said about two-thirds of the budget is “applied” toward pipeline and partnerships, with less emphasis on what he called “blue sky” research.
He also cited operational efficiency claims, including reducing “90% of the experimental cost and work out of chemical development” and cutting average timelines from idea to identifying the right compound to 17 months compared with an industry standard of 42 months.
Looking ahead, Taylor said Recursion aims to validate its technology step-by-step rather than “scale it before validation.” He said the company is already running “over 20 programs internally” and emphasized a portfolio management approach focused on ending programs that do not work and investing behind those that do. He added that even if multiple clinical programs succeed, Recursion may not advance all of them independently, depending on infrastructure needs, while maintaining the capability to move programs forward internally when appropriate.
About Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:RXRX)
Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Inc (NASDAQ: RXRX) is a biopharmaceutical company that combines advanced automation, artificial intelligence and high-throughput biology to discover and develop novel therapeutics. The company’s proprietary platform integrates deep-learning algorithms with large-scale cellular imaging and chemical biology, enabling the rapid identification of potential drug candidates across a range of indications. By automating complex laboratory workflows and leveraging computational models, Recursion aims to accelerate the drug discovery process and expand the scope of targets that can be addressed.
At the core of Recursion’s offering is its digital biology platform, which captures billions of cell images under varying chemical and genetic perturbations.
