Exscientia and Recursion Enter Definitive Agreement

13 August 2024

Recursion and Exscientia plc have announced the companies have entered into a definitive agreement, combining Recursion, a leading clinical stage technology-enabled biotech company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery, with Exscientia, a technology-driven clinical stage drug design and development company, committed to creating more effective medicines for patients, faster.

Chris Gibson, Co-Founder and CEO of Recursion as well as the planned CEO of the combined entity, said: “We believe the proposed combination is deeply complementary and aligned with our missions to industrialize drug discovery to deliver high quality medicines and lower prices for consumers,”

“Exscientia’s precision chemistry tools and capabilities, including its newly commissioned automated small molecule synthesis platform, will augment our tech-enabled biology and chemistry exploration, hit discovery and translational capabilities. I am excited to continue building the best example of the next generation of biotechnology companies. It still feels like we are just getting started.”

David Hallett, Interim Chief Executive Officer of Exscientia and planned Chief Scientific Officer of Recursion post-closing of the transaction, said: “Adding Exscientia’s best-in-class focused precision oncology internal pipeline to Recursion’s first-in-class focused pipeline spanning rare disease, precision oncology and infectious disease is highly complementary as we look to bring treatments to patients faster.

“We look forward to bringing our teams together and integrating Recursion's high throughput and target biology capabilities with Exscientia's highly scalable molecular design and automated chemistry synthesis capabilities to truly accelerate the discovery of better drugs for patients.”

Once integrated, the companies believe the extended and evolved Recursion OS will enable the discovery and translation of higher quality medicines more efficiently and at a higher scale with a full-stack technology-enabled small molecule discovery platform. In addition, the combined company expects to read out approximately 10 clinical trials in the next 18 months.

The proposed business combination will also advance significant therapeutic discovery collaborations with some of the most prominent biopharma companies in the world, including Roche-Genentech, Sanofi, Bayer, and Merck KGaA. Moreover, there is the potential for approximately $200 million in milestone payments over the next 2 years from these current partnerships and there is the potential for more than $20 billion in revenue before royalties on net-sales of partnership programs which range from mid single-digit to double-digit royalties over the course of the partnership.

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