Salt Lake City-based Recursion and Oxford rival Exscientia have entered into a definitive agreement to combine the two companies, with an end goal of using tech to create novel treatments, faster.
According to Recursion, the deal will bring together its scaled biology exploration and translational capabilities with Exscientia’s AI-driven precision chemistry design and small molecule automated synthesis capabilities to create a technology-first, end-to-end drug discovery platform. The deal combines the companies' complementary pipelines: Exscientia’s focused precision oncology pipeline and Recursion’s focused pipeline spanning rare disease, precision oncology and infectious disease. The combined company expects to read out approximately 10 clinical trials in the next 18 months.
In addition, the proposed combo would bring together partnerships with leading large pharma companies. Recursion, which inked a multi-year AI collab with NVIDIA last year, has deals in place with Roche's Genentech and Bayer, while Exscientia has partnerships with Sanofi, Merck KGaA and BMS.
As part of the all-stock deal, Exscientia shareholders will receive 0.7729 Recursion shares for each Exscientia share they hold.