Salt Lake City-based Recursion Pharmaceuticals is joining forces with the United Kingdom’s Exscientia, a biotechnology company that specializes in cancer research, in a $688 million deal executives say will help make “high quality medicines and lower prices” more widely available.
The biotech companies announced the merger last week. Combining each company’s resources could bring more cancer and rare disease treatments to market more quickly, according to a news release from Recursion.
“With the announcement of our proposed combination with Exscientia, we leap closer to our vision of a full-stack technology-enabled small molecule discovery platform that we are confident has the potential to meaningfully improve the efficiency of drug discovery in the coming decade,” Recursion CEO Chris Gibson said in a news release. (Gibson is on the board of directors of The Salt Lake Tribune.)
The companies have a combined 10 clinical drug trials that could have results ready for public consumption in the next 18 months, and other trials in the pipeline, according to the news release.
Both companies use artificial intelligence to collect and interpret data they then use to inform clinical drug research. Recursion focuses on rare and infectious diseases, according to its website. It is testing possible treatments for such conditions as neurofibromatosis (which causes benign tumors on nerve cells), familial adenomatous polyposis (a genetic gastrointestinal disease) and other inflammatory and fibrotic diseases.
Exscientia, meanwhile, specializes in “focused precision oncology” and is developing treatments for advanced solid tumors and other advanced cancers.
The companies will share resources, including technology, datasets and already-active partnerships with such pharmaceutical companies as Bayer and Sanofi, according to the announcement.
“Adding Exscientia’s best-in-class focused precision oncology internal pipeline to Recursion’s first-in-class focused pipeline … is highly complementary as we look to bring treatments to patients faster,” Exscientia’s interim CEO David Gallett said in a news release.
Gallett will become the combined company’s chief scientific officer once the deal is completed, which is expected to happen early in 2025, according to the announcement. Gibson will lead both companies as CEO.
The merger has been interpreted as a bit of a lifeline for Exscientia, which announced plans to lay off roughly a quarter of its staff in May, according to a quarterly report. Exscientia’s former CEO and founder Andrew Hopkins was fired in February over what the company called “inappropriate” relationships with two employees, according to an SEC filing.
The merger is still pending regulatory reviews and approval.
Any operational changes, including potential relocations, will be discussed in the coming months, said Ryan Kelly, Recursion’s chief communications officer, and will likely not be decided until the deal is done. Until then, Kelly said, it’s business as usual at each company “for the foreseeable future.”
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