Source: Handback Pharmaceuticals
AI drug pioneer Return Pharmaceutical said on Wednesday that one of its experimental treatments had reached a key milestone.
Recursion is able to use its artificial intelligence drug discovery platform to identify areas of biology that treat solid tumors and lymphomas, match them with drug candidates and gain regulatory approval along the way, initiating studies at less cost. .
“We think this is a very exciting piece of evidence, not just for our company but for the tech-bio industry,” CEO and co-founder Chris Gibson told CNBC. .
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved an Investigational New Drug Application for a Phase 1/2 clinical trial of an experimental drug candidate called REC-1245. The company said the potential market for the therapy could be more than 100,000 patients in the United States and the European Union.
The trial, which will evaluate the safety and tolerability of REC-1245, will begin in the fourth quarter of this year. The company said Phase 1 data from the dose-escalation portion of the study could be completed by the end of next year.
The drug will target RBM39, which Recursion says is functionally similar to the well-known but difficult-to-target marker CDK12, and is used to treat advanced HR-proficient cancers such as ovarian, prostate, breast and pancreatic cancers.
“I think what’s really exciting about this particular recursive program is that this small molecule and novel target basically came out of the equivalent of a Google search, out of the huge map of biology that we’ve built,” said Gibson. Recursion has been working on it for the past 11 years A massive collection of materials created during the year.
“This is the first project that came out of this,” he continued. “This is the first program to really take advantage of many of the new tools we’ve built into one unit.”
There are strong hopes that artificial intelligence will significantly speed up drug discovery and reduce costs by eliminating some of the time-consuming trial and error in screening and selecting drug candidates. But investors have always wanted to see reality live up to the hype.
Returned shares year-to-date
Recursion’s investors include Nvidia, whose shares have fallen 38% in 2024.
The company is planning to merge with an artificial intelligence drug discovery company Knowledgewhich will allow it to leverage more data. The deal is expected to close early next year.
Most analysts have a “hold” rating on Recursion stock, but two analysts do have a “buy” rating on the stock, according to FactSet. The average analyst price target is $10.14, implying a return of 64%.
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