Via C&EN (article by Laura Howes):
The business of using artificial intelligence to find new drugs is starting to consolidate. The AI-powered drug discovery firm Recursion Pharmaceuticals will buy rival Exscientia in an all-stock deal that values Exscientia at roughly $650 million.
The transaction is expected to close in early 2025, and the resulting company will have the Recursion name, according to an announcement of the deal.
In the announcement, the companies portray the merger as creating an end-to-end drug discovery company by combining Recursion’s biology expertise and Exscientia’s chemistry know-how.
“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,” Recursion CEO Chris Gibson says in the announcement.
Salt Lake City–based Recursion has a huge in-house dataset of chemistry-biology interactions, which allows it to search for new drug targets and hits. Using that expertise, the firm has built a pipeline of drug candidates covering oncology, rare diseases, and infectious diseases.
I'm vaguely surprised at this, but I am not a keen observer of the AI/medicinal chemistry world. If this becomes a trend, I can't imagine this would be a good trend for employment for computationally-oriented medicinal chemists.
No comments:
Post a Comment
looks like Blogger doesn't work with anonymous comments from Chrome browsers at the moment - works in Microsoft Edge, or from Chrome with a Blogger account - sorry! CJ 3/21/20