Recursion and Google Cloud Expand Partnership For Drug Discovery With AI

Recursion is one of the notable TechBio companies that work on decoding biology to improve lives. Today, the company announced an extended partnership with Google Cloud to strengthen its drug discovery platform. The strategic partnership will utilize Google Cloud's technologies, such as generative AI capabilities like Gemini models, to support RecursionOS in enhancing searches and access through BigQuery and scaling computing resources. 

Additionally, Recursion plans to explore making some AI models available on Google Cloud. This collaboration is part of Recursion's efforts to address the bio-pharmaceutical industry's slow and costly drug development challenges to ultimately reduce the time and cost of bringing new therapies to patients and promoting accessible healthcare worldwide.

The average cost of developing a novel drug increased 15% over the past year to about $2.3 billion, Deloitte reported. Thus, the increased cost combined with higher time-to-market conditions lowers the scope for new therapies and subsequently pushes healthcare costs. In this regard, Recursion is utilizing its proprietary datasets, AI tools, computing power, and other technologies on the Google Cloud platform to accelerate research activities involved in drug discovery. 

The ultimate vision behind Recursion is changing the industry by optimizing the drug development process and enhancing its success rates to deliver new, life-saving treatments to patients more quickly and more affordably.

Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion, stated, "Our partnership with Google Cloud supports the acceleration of our research to bring new and better treatments to patients more efficiently," also commented, "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."

Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, said, "We can help unlock the complexities of biology by using cutting-edge AI tools. Through our partnership with Recursion, we're supporting the discovery of novel therapeutics by combining Recursion's vast biological dataset and 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."

The two companies have collaborated for more than six years. Google Cloud has provided infrastructure and services like Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE), Google Compute Engine, and cloud storage to allow the company to control its biological and chemical data and perform complex calculations necessary for extracting insights using foundational models. This has already resulted in effective AI-based deployment to accelerate the drug discovery process undertaken by Recursion, with cost-effectiveness and the acceleration of INDs.

The partnership will enhance Recursion's innovation ability and the new delivery of treatments. Some of the core activities are:

Gemini Models Exploration: The company, being a preferred AI Cloud Partner of Recursion, Google Cloud, would provide Recursion access to the Gemini family of models, which the company will deploy across all of its programs in drug discovery. A part of Recursion's AI models will be available on Google Cloud. 

Improved Data Search & Access:  Using Google Cloud BigQuery, Recursion can tap into its massive proprietary dataset at warp speed, identifying all the key data points in no time, thereby improving efficiency.

Scaling Resources: Recursion will bring in action computing resources highly efficiently to run large inference workflows, scale up its computing resources well beyond its current GPU capacity, and accelerate iterations of drug discovery.

Data Management: Google Cloud storage would become central storage for the vast biological data amassed in Recursion, thus enabling its team to store, manage, and transform information effectively.

Data Privacy & Security: In handling sensitive data, data security, compliance, and privacy are strict standpoints Recursion maintains. Google Cloud provides customer data ownership and default encryption for better protection.