Nvidia Bets $50 Million on Recursion AI for AI-Powered Drug Discovery

Recursion has recently unveiled its partnership with Nvidia, in which the company will receive $50 million in private investment in public equity (PIPE) financing, as well as access to Nvidia’s cloud-based tools. These tools will assist Recursion in its AI-powered drug discovery, an area where the company has already made significant progress.

In addition to the AI computing tools offered by Nvidia, Recursion will also have access to the company’s expertise in fine-tuning and scaling up the models produced through the partnership.

The aim of this collaboration is to utilize Nvidia DGX Cloud, an AI-training-as-a-service platform, to develop new AI models for drug discovery.

To train the AI models on Nvidia’s cloud platform, Recursion advisor Yoshua Bengio, an AI pioneer, has stated that the company will leverage its 23-petabyte dataset of biological and chemical data. This extensive dataset contains information on as many as 3 trillion gene and compound relationships.

In other stock-related news, Recursion has sold over 7.7 million of its Class A common stock to its new partner, resulting in Nvidia holding approximately a 4% stake in the company.

Through this collaboration, Nvidia has gained the ability to license the developed models to other biotech firms via its BioNeMo platform, which is a generative AI service released earlier this year. The goal of the platform is to expedite the creation of potential new drug compounds.

Recursion plans to leverage the BioNeMo platform to aid in its work. This utilization of the platform is not limited to the project with Nvidia but extends to current and future projects with other partner companies, including Roche and Bayer.

Recursion’s OS platform is equipped with machine-learning algorithms that scan through its database to identify potential drug targets and the compounds that might effectively reach them. This platform has already facilitated the discovery of numerous drug candidates.

Some of these candidates are in phase 1/2 trials, while others are in the late-discovery and preclinical phases of developing other drugs.

The phase 1/2 trial drugs include candidates for two oncology therapeutics targeting certain mutant cancers and familial adenomatous polyposis.

Overall, the partnership between Recursion and Nvidia in the field of AI-powered drug discovery holds tremendous potential for revolutionizing the process of identifying new drug candidates. By combining Recursion’s vast dataset with Nvidia’s advanced computing capabilities, groundbreaking models in biology and chemistry can be developed at an unprecedented scale. This collaboration not only benefits Recursion but also allows Nvidia to leverage the developed AI tools through its BioNeMo platform, further accelerating the creation of potential new drug compounds.

What does the company CEO have to say about the AI-powered drug discovery?

“With our powerful dataset and Nvidia’s accelerated computing capabilities, we intend to create groundbreaking foundation models in biology and chemistry at a scale unlike anything that has ever been released in the biological space,” shared Recursion CEO Chris Gibson.