Recursion Pharmaceuticals (NASDAQ:RXRX) outlined progress across its clinical pipeline, drug-discovery partnerships and AI-enabled research platform, while lowering its 2026 cash operating expense guidance to $375 million and reaffirming expectations for an operating runway through early 2028.
The company said it now has five clinical-stage programs and has generated more than $500 million in realized cash inflows through partnerships. Management emphasized that its drug-discovery approach combines proprietary biological data, AI models and experimental validation in a continuous “lab-in-the-loop” system.
Genentech Neuroscience Program Advances
According to Recursion, the neuroscience effort used induced pluripotent stem cell-derived neuronal and microglial cells at scale, including more than 1 trillion neurons and hundreds of billions of microglia. The company said its models evaluated biological signatures across more than 17,000 genes and tens of millions of data points, generating potential targets that were subsequently assessed through multiple experimental assays.
Management said the collaboration with Roche Genentech has produced more than $216 million in upfront and milestone payments to date. Recursion also cited the potential for more than $300 million in additional development, commercialization and sales milestones for each future small-molecule program under the collaboration.
The company said the milestone provides early evidence that its platform can identify and validate new biological targets rather than solely optimize work on known biology. It added that the underlying datasets could potentially be reused to identify additional neuroscience opportunities.
FAP Program to Present Additional Data
Chief Medical Officer Vicki Goodman highlighted REC-4881, an oral MEK1/2 inhibitor being evaluated in familial adenomatous polyposis, or FAP. The disease causes patients to develop hundreds or thousands of polyps in the gastrointestinal tract and often requires colectomy and continued surveillance or additional procedures.
Goodman said there are no approved systemic therapies to alter the course of FAP in post-colectomy patients. Recursion estimates there are more than 50,000 such patients in the U.S. and EU5 and cited a potential addressable market exceeding $10 billion.
In the ongoing Phase II TUPELO study, patients receiving REC-4881 after colectomy showed a median 43% reduction in polyp burden after three months of treatment, Goodman said. She added that reductions were sustained after three months off treatment and were observed in both the upper and lower gastrointestinal tract. The company characterized the safety profile as manageable, with predominantly mild-to-moderate adverse events consistent with other MEK inhibitors.
Recursion is continuing enrollment in TUPELO, including a dose-optimization cohort. Additional data are scheduled for presentation at the CGA-IGC Conference in November, and the company expects to provide an update on FDA discussions later this year. Goodman said regulatory discussions have focused on reducing uncertainty around study design, including the appropriate primary endpoint, in a disease with limited regulatory precedent.
REC-7735 Set for Phase I Initiation
Recursion also said the FDA cleared its investigational new drug application for REC-7735, a precision-designed PI3K inhibitor for cancers with the PIK3CA H1047R mutation. The company intends to initiate the Phase I ZINNIA trial later this year.
Goodman said REC-7735 was designed to be more than 100-fold selective for the H1047R mutation relative to wild-type PI3K. Existing PI3K inhibitors can inhibit wild-type PI3K and cause hyperglycemia, which can limit dosing and potentially lead to hyperinsulinemia that reactivates the PI3K signaling pathway, she said.
The initial dose-escalation portion of ZINNIA will enroll patients with PIK3CA H1047R-mutant solid tumors. Recursion plans to evaluate a cohort of patients vulnerable to hyperglycemia after establishing tolerability at an active dose, followed by dose optimization in ER-positive, HER2-negative breast cancer. The company said it may expand to additional tumor types based on emerging data and expects first dose-escalation data in the first half of 2028.
Management said REC-7735 was delivered as a development candidate in 10 months, following the synthesis of 242 compounds across 13 design cycles. The company said its platform identified a previously unpublished binding pocket and found no identified off-target liabilities in its preclinical work.
AI Platform and Spending Plans
Recursion said it has generated and aggregated more than 50 petabytes of multimodal biological data. Management said its chemistry platform has advanced candidates using roughly 330 compounds over about a year and a half, compared with an industry benchmark cited by the company of roughly 2,500 compounds over four years for small-molecule discovery.
The company also described AI agents being deployed in biology, chemistry and clinical development. It said a target-discovery tool can help scientists interrogate biological maps in hours rather than weeks, while a chemistry design agent has reduced structural-analysis work from roughly four hours to about 30 minutes. In clinical development, management said agentic workflows have contributed to enrollment improvements of approximately 1.3 to 1.6 times historical benchmarks.
Recursion named Dr. Hoifung Poon as chief AI officer and Dr. Donovan Chin to lead drug design. Management said Poon will oversee the company’s end-to-end AI strategy, while Chin brings experience across small molecules, RNA-targeted therapeutics, proximity-based medicines and peptide modalities.
CFO Ben Taylor said the company lowered its 2026 full-year cash operating expense guidance to $375 million, representing a nearly 40% reduction from comparable 2024 pro forma expenses. He said Recursion ended the quarter with approximately $557 million in cash and equivalents and believes that balance provides operating runway through early 2028.
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.
