Thanks, everyone, for joining us for our Second Day of our Second Annual Guggenheim Healthcare Innovation Conference. I'm Bommel Devon, for those of you who may not know me, one of the biopharma A nalyst here. Also, at the end of the line here, our Sydney Shepherd-Villi is also from the Guggenheim side. Very pleased to kick things off in this room today with Recursion Pharmaceuticals. A lot of exciting stuff to talk about with the company. We have Najat Khan, who's now the incoming CEO as of January 1, currently the Chief R&D Officer and the CCO. A lot of titles there for Najat. And Ben Taylor, the CFO, also up here on the stage. If anyone in the audience has questions, please raise your hand. We can get you a mic to ask as well.
Big announcements last week, Najat, as you're taking over as the CEO and starting in the new year. Maybe you can just talk about, you've been in the company about a year, a year and a half now, why this was the right time to make this change. Beyond that, you obviously have these other titles. What's the plan for sort of future announcements on the leadership side for the company?
Yeah, no, great question. Great to be here. Thank you for having us on the first morning slot. Look, I mean, this is part of, in terms of the transition, it's been a planned transition for some time. The company has really evolved from, let's take a bet on can AI actually uncover novel targets, design, et cetera, and so forth, to now we're moving from what I like to call potential to proof points and then eventually to proof of impact. With that evolution, I mean, we had discussed some of this transition for some time, but there's going to be great continuity as well. Chris will remain, he'll be on the Board as the Chair, and he'll also be an executive advisor to me through the transition. I really, really value his input, and we have a great working relationship.
Rob Hershberg, who also is the chair today and has a fantastic background in sort of the era that we're getting into, which is around really making differentiated therapeutics, I think that's where you're seeing the evolution of tech bio. He will be the lead Independent Director and Vice Chair as well. There is a lot of continuity. To your second question in terms of just the various roles and the titles and so forth, look, we have a really good bench of functional leadership across the organization. I think that only got augmented by, and Ben is sitting next to me, by the special combination with Exscientia. My role in many ways is also to ensure the continuity and connectivity across the different groups, right? You have science, you have tech, and of course, you have some of the other organizations really focused on the business transformation.
The other aspect of it is, look, as an organization transforms, we're always evolving our capabilities, the depth of our bench, and so forth. My focus as CEO is really going to be a lot on the continuation from what you've seen in the last 18 months. The last 18 months has been a great opportunity to shape the company. First, of course, with the integration with Exscientia to really make our platform end to end, not just biology AI native, but actually designing compounds and building our clinical development AI platform from the ground up. That already shows you the arc of where we're going from ideas to actually the end of the arc, which would be differentiated therapeutics. Also sharpening the portfolio, also sharpening our cost base. Some of the areas of focus for me, I would say, is threefold.
One is increasing shareholder value and impact for patients. That has to be the core of why we do what we do. And how do we do that? One is continue to strengthen that pipeline. We have some important readouts like FAP coming up later this year. The other is around our partnerships. We do not talk about it enough, but you have seen some of the announcements from Roche and Sanofi, four out of four milestones. For Roche, for instance, a $30 million milestone with a Microglia Map for first-of-its kind, and more to come, but turning those into programs. By the way, each of those programs, a lot of the heavy lifting is actually being done in partnership with our collaborator. The milestones for each of the programs is about $300 million per program. These are meaningful milestones, not a one-off.
The last thing I'll say is really around the platform. The AI space moves so fast. We can't invest in everywhere. We only invest in areas where it can make a difference. We also have to stay at the forefront of some of the revolution that's happening in the space and building a team and culture that's bilingual, that knows how to make medicines using AI. I can't emphasize how important that is. That's one of our secret sauce. Lots to do.
Yeah. Okay. Congrats again on the rolloff. It's a very exciting time. I do want to start a little bit higher level on sort of the space and the industry, because as you're saying, it's changing so quickly. Then we'll dive deeper into some of your key assets here. Maybe you could just give us a sense. You obviously have a long track record here in this industry. How has the conversation changed with investors as we move from sort of, as you kind of talk about the potential, and now we're getting these points of proving it? Are you seeing investors sort of, I think as we've had conversation with investors, I think people have been waiting for that proof part. Are you seeing people sort of looking forward to that and kind of coming more into the space? Just maybe your general sense of the conversation.
Yeah. I'll start, but Ben has also been in the space for a very long time and has really good perspectives here. What I've seen, I think the last decade has really been around a lot of skepticism, a lot of, hey, can it actually help? Can it really work? Or is it going to lead to more errors? Can we just do things the way we do it today? I think you're seeing a certain shift from that. I think the next decade, as I was saying, is going to be focused on going from potential to proof of concept to eventually proof of impact. We have different types of investors, more generalist investors, more biotech investors. We sort of sit at the edge of both.
What I would say is there's a lot of really questions around how do you, I think from generalist investors, how do we ensure that this is not true? It's a true platform. It's not a one-off, one-two asset play. How do we stay at the forefront? This is where our collaborations with MIT, with Boltz-2, or we were the first to have this really fast, the fastest supercomputer today with NVIDIA, which you've seen kind of Lilly and other pharma companies trying to dip their toes in that water, which is fantastic because in order to analyze a lot of this data, you do need that foundational capabilities. I would say on the biotech investors, there's been a lot around how do you harness all of this to create a compound that is differentiated.
What I have noticed in the last, I would say, six months to a year, there's much more convergence on both sides. Biotech investors, yes, they want to look at what's your lead stage compound or your latest stage compound. Then they're also asking, and we've done this in the last earnings call, by the way, what element of the platform are we using for that specific program that is making the difference or that we are testing? Same thing from tech investors, which is fantastic. You have this end-to-end tech stack that no one's seen before. That is what we're used to in other industries. How are you using it to make a product that creates value? You start to see more of that conversion, which is exactly where I think tech bio, this is why I'm excited for the future, has to go.
Innovation with purpose, with pragmatism to create value for shareholders and patients.
Yeah. Just a couple of things to add on to that. One, when we really think back to how the company was originally funded, the mandate of the company, what makes us different? A lot of the money came in from what we would call innovation investors, which sort of straddle those two sides Najat was talking about between the tech and generalist side and the biotech side. They understood both, and they said, we're frustrated with the biotech investing model. We don't like the binary risk scenarios that we always have to make decisions on. How do we get to something that looks more like a business model? That's really what we've tried to build. We've tried to build something that has an internal pipeline that has the potential to deliver on that larger value. That would be more traditional to the biotech specialist universe.
We also have a partnership base where we've brought in over $500 million in inflows already and hope to do a lot more on top of that. That is more familiar to the generalist and tech side of the world. We're able to scale that. Both of those are done at a higher scale than would be usual for a company of our size. That's been something that the original investors really had the vision for. To Najat's point, I think a lot of people in the investment community are coming around and seeing the difference that a platform can make. This is an area where rather than investors leading the industry, I think a lot of the industry started to adopt before the investors did. We were excited to see Eli Lilly make their big investment behind a supercomputer.
We think there's a lot of validation that's been bubbling up in the techniques that we're using, the technologies that we really were leaders from the beginning. We now see a lot of people starting to adopt because we're getting to better outcomes. The fact that investors are now educated on that and really want to dig in and understand the detail, we think positions us well because we have been building that more consolidated platform for quite a while.
Okay. Maybe one more from me before we get more into the assets themselves. You touched on the integration between Recursion and Exscientia. Just how has that integration gone? How would you say Recursion has changed in the year or so since the integration started?
Yeah. I'm happy to start on sort of the nuts and bolts of the integration. It's actually gone incredibly well. From day one, we were able to bring parts of the technology platform together. It was actually really interesting. Our tech stack fit together quite well. It was our G&A systems that we had to rebuild from scratch. Now we've been doing most all of that. Definitely all of our restructuring has been completed. A couple of important notes. I'm sure you'll ask about cash flows later on. One of the things that we tried to do with the combination was look at the best of the best from both sides of the companies and bring them together. What that allowed us to do was really become far more efficient whilst not compromising on the quality of what we were trying to put together.
We were actually able to take about 35% out of our expense base, which is over $200 million, and still be able to deliver on what we feel like are the highest value elements. All of that's behind us now. We're really focused on how do we execute on the things that we've prioritized.
Yeah. The only thing I'd add, it's a very complementary partnership, collaboration, et cetera. Anytime you try to integrate two companies, getting companies to work together from a cultural perspective is probably, I mean, I've seen a lot of integrations before. Small, big is one of the hardest. Especially when geographically Salt Lake City, London, and then we have a New York office also in the middle. I think core to it has been sort of the design principles from people perspective that we've done. Number one, when you look at the organization pre-integration and post, the proportion of legacy Exscientia and legacy Recursion has stayed the same of leaders at the top level all the way to more deeper in the org. That's actually really important so you infuse, and it doesn't feel one overtakes the other.
The second is, look, if you're going to do the arc of novel targets from a broad space, massive biology, to then functional validation that these are actually meaningful, to then designing the compounds and then getting it in the clinic, you got to have both companies come together and the capabilities to go vertically end to end. That is what the integration has allowed us to do very rapidly versus building it all from scratch. I think that's smart. The last thing I'll also say is it's allowed us to tap into many different markets when it comes to talent as well. I'll always say that one of the hardest things is finding people that are bilingual, like biologists that understand what engineers are trying to do and engineers that understand what a chemist is trying to do when they're trying to design certain compounds.
That glue is what a tech bio company, and look, quite frankly, many pharma companies, that's what it's going to look like in five, ten years. How hard is it to find somebody, a biologist that's open-minded and understands AI or a chemist and so forth? Supremely difficult. I cannot emphasize how important that is. And it's going quite well. Is it perfect? I do not think any integration is ever perfect. To be able to do it with that speed, retaining the culture, retaining the capabilities, and to Ben's point, the operational efficiencies that allow us to extend our runway has been really good.
Okay. Great. Let me turn it over to Najat about some of the key assets here.
Yeah. So, just talking about your pipeline, you're very active in oncology and in rare disease, two therapeutic areas. When we look at the oncology pipeline, and admittedly, we're not oncology analysts, a lot of those targets, they look somewhat new. Some of these targets we saw for the first time. Some of them are a little obscure, sort of on the bleeding edge of oncology. Is that intentional? I'm guessing yes. Maybe you can talk about your strategy there and then the assets that you're most excited about.
Great. No, it's a great point. If I can just take one quick step back just to say, Recursion is focused on four therapeutic areas. Our wholly owned programs, as you rightly said, is oncology and rare disease today. With our partners, Roche, Genentech, we're focused in neuroscience and GI onc. With Sanofi and I&I and oncology, and with Bayer and Mercury KGL, also oncology. I just wanted to highlight that. Our work spans across four large, large therapeutic areas. We're very deep, for instance, in the neurospace, knocking out every gene in the human genome and then figuring out what pathways and targets exist. Just as a point. In terms of back to oncology, yeah, our focus has always been to go after the uncharted in two ways. One, novel targets, completely novel that haven't been tackled before.
There, the functional validation to make sure that it can be translatable is very, the burden of evidence is, of course, very high. Then the other, you'll see that we also have targets that are known but hard to drug today or just on the bleeding edge. We haven't figured it out either. It's a therapeutic index issue or so forth. I'll give you some examples. For instance, in the first area, you do have things like RBM39, which is a novel target, but you also have targeting like first-in-disease like FAP, which does not have any approved drugs to date. We have a MEK1/2 allosteric inhibitor that was discovered in an unbiased fashion in terms of what can actually take disease state and FAP to healthy state, right? That's one.
You have in the other bucket, for instance, CDK7, which, look, we know CDK4/6 is important, cell cycle inhibitors from that perspective. Transcriptional inhibitors, a little bit more challenging earlier in development. CDK7 sort of straddles both, right, from a functional perspective. That is an area where there are other molecules, but it's really hard to thread that needle. We shared some data in our earnings call last week. We're going after things that are hard that showcase our platform either from a novel biology or from designing, leveraging AI and other approaches for things that are harder to design. The other piece I want to mention is whether you do oncology or rare diseases, clinical development is something that becomes, it's understated in tech bio, not in biotech. We all know how important it is, but in tech bio.
We've actually built out the entire platform on which patients are we selecting, patient stratification, patient selection using multimodal and real-world data, as well as recruitment and acceleration. Your bread and butter, like how do you actually do protocols faster, simulate the protocols before you actually execute a trial and so forth. That's important in oncology because it's a highly competitive space. The standard of care is evolving so fast. In rare diseases, quite frankly, there isn't a lot of precedence. You need both, but from different strategic vantage points.
Great. To zoom in on CDK7, I understand one of the issues with that target is toxicity. Can you talk a little about how you address that and what have you seen from that molecule today?
Yeah. No, I mean, look, CDK7 inhibitors, people have worked on it for some time. As you rightly said, it's really managing that therapeutic index. You end up with, others have seen quite a bit of GI tox that makes it challenging to really dose up to the dose that you want to really run the experiment in the appropriate way to get appropriate target engagement. The molecule, this molecule was designed using our platform on the design side, AI-driven design side. The focus was how do you mitigate issues with efflux as an example, which is one of the drivers of this jump, increased permeability, and also have a half-life that allows you to thread the needle between hitting the target hard but not too long and getting out quickly.
Look, we're in, we just finished monotherapy dose escalation, which we shared some of the data last week. From a perspective of safety, especially GI-related tox, it's manageable. We see 7% discontinuation, no grade four or five. Also, again, it's not a fair comparison, but when we look at some of the other compounds developed so far, the GI toxicity, whether it's diarrhea or nausea, is lower, trending lower than what we've seen with some other compounds and other published data. That's an initial sign, right? It's early days. What we're doing right now is really, and we also saw some monotherapy activity. We did see a PR and some stable disease. We did not expect to see any activity from a monotherapy perspective because with most CDKs, you need combo to really show the value.
The other thing also to note is from a PD perspective, target engagement of about 80%-90%. So, exposure that's high, target engagement that's encouraging, safety trending in the right direction, right? But it's early days. And we've started our combo in ovarian cancer, second line, platinum resistant. So, that's really going to be an important part for us to really see in the combo what kind of safety profile and also efficacy that we're seeing.
Understood. Maybe take a step back from the pipeline. You talked about your partnership revenue, which I understand is almost like a CRO pilot. Is that almost like a CRO-type revenue? There are also the milestones from your partnership programs. I'm just curious, how do you expect that to scale, let's say, over the next three to five years, given that now it's an appreciable top line that you have sort of on a recurring basis?
Yeah. You know, one thing I'll say is it's different, and I get asked this question a lot in terms of how many partnerships and so forth. The way it's not, I would say, a CRO, but really hands-on, working shoulder to shoulder with your partners, is we tend to do a curated list of very deep strategic partnerships. For instance, our Roche, Genentech partnership, that's requiring us to build these, as we say, maps or atlases of biology that no one's ever built before, like the microglia one, which is the immune cells of the brain, which has never been studied. Look at how much we talked about Alzheimer's and Parkinson's and ALS and the Neuroimmune Axis . That was a, we had to, we developed, the team developed 100 billion microglia cells.
It's not so much, and so that was step one is to actually make those cells. Then you do different types of perturbations. You knock out every gene in the human genome, or you do overexpression because that's also critical, or many other different types of chemical perturbations and so forth. What it allows you to do is to actually get a map of not just gene-gene associations, but the pathways that are so poorly understood in biology today. That was a deep collaboration with Genentech. Now what we're focused on is taking those insights and turning those into programs. It's a huge lift. It is not a, give us a target, we'll do a little program. It's not like that. The burden of work that is equal in terms of what Roche and Genentech and Recursion is doing.
The other thing people get surprised is, like, oh, we didn't know you had such wet lab capabilities in addition to dry lab. We, like for instance, the other map we made for Roche, Genentech, which was last year, which we're already working on programs for, which is iPSC-derived neuronal cells. We've made the largest 1 trillion, the largest amount that anybody's ever made. Why is this important? You know, to me personally, it's important because it's another validation of our platform to show that you can actually start from biology, novel targets, functionally validate, and work with one of the top leaders in the space in the world to do it. That's a validation of a platform in a different orthogonal way to what we're doing with our wholly owned programs. Another example, our partnership with Sanofi as an example is really focused on the design element.
Very hard targets in immunology and oncology, and we're designing compounds. I mean, on the fact that we've been able to achieve four out of four milestones in the last 18 months is a testament. This is like the wet lab, the dry lab, all of the in silico, the iteration. It's another validation. We have more milestones coming up next year. To answer your question, look, we get a lot of outreach in terms of partnerships. Maybe one, another big partnership is something we'd be looking to do, but it has to be a very deep shoulder-to-shoulder sort of collaborative partnership. We don't want to do sort of small CRO-type engagements.
Before we take off, there is another program I do want to say, FAP, which is probably going to be one of our first potential proof of concept, the entire arc on the biology and seeing that in our platform to in vivo work and then see it in the clinic. We shared some data at DDW where we did see polyp burden reduction for about six efficacy-valuable patients ranging from 30%-80% polyp burden. That is the hallmark of the disease. That is the highest polyp burden reduction ever seen in this disease in a trial. Today, the standard of care is surgery because patients have hundreds, sometimes thousands of polyps, and you have to do surgery, colectomy, and a lot of surveillance, 100% risk of colorectal cancer if you do not. We have more data coming in the same dose, 4 milligram cohort later this year.
I think that's going to be a really important validation if the data holds. We'll see. Fingers and paws crossed. I think that's going to be for one of our first POCs if the data holds. I just wanted to highlight that also. We have two kind of pieces of validation, internal programs as well as our partnerships. That's the strategic reason as to why we do it in addition to the non-dilutive revenues, which is, or milestones, that's always helpful.
Yep. Let me turn it back to Bommel to wrap up.
Yeah. Just, so obviously that's your next big event, maybe just in the last minute or two here, just key things we should be looking out for for the next 6-12 months. Again, you mentioned the cash position. Where you stand right now.
Of course. I'll start with cash position and quickly hit on some of the milestones. Cash position, we're in great shape. We had just under $800 million in the bank around the end of the quarter. That gets us through year-end 2027 without any additional financing. We do have partnership inflows coming in just to emphasize some of the points that Najat was just talking about. Those are actually really close collaborations where they can be, they bring in a lot of cash inflows, but also can be very profitable over time. That's a real differentiation. We actually think of it as using the exact same platform that we have for our internal pipeline, but being able to access the scale that we're able to do on that.
Some of the programs, when we look at like a Sanofi program, the MPV of one of those programs is actually about half of what it would be for an internal program, just showing how strong the economics are. Feeling really good about the partnerships, feeling good about the cash balance and the runway. Really looking forward to not only additional partner milestones coming up, which we do not give guidance on beyond the fact of in May, we said we would have at least $100 million in partner inflows by year-end 2026. We absolutely feel comfortable with that goal. And then clinical milestones as well.
Yeah. I mean, I think FAP is an important one, as I mentioned, that's in December. Also, we have other milestones for other programs like RBM, et cetera, coming up. The other thing that we do not talk about is in discovery. We have multiple more programs coming in. I mean, this is the value of having a pipeline. It is not a one-off asset. One thing that we're committed to, and you saw us do this earlier this year, is real rapid and efficient go-no-goes. We have options and we cannot prosecute everything. We are only going to prosecute the ones which have most value and rapid and efficient go-no-goes are going to be important to be good stewards of capital.
Okay. We have to leave it there. These 25-minute fires are always, I feel like, a little tight and rushed, especially when you have a lot going on. Thanks so much for joining us.
Thank you.
We'll be watching.
Really appreciate it. [crosstalk]
Thank you. Thank you for the time.
Thank you.