Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Inc. (NASDAQ:RXRX) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

On the pipeline side, we’ve got multiple Phase 2 trial starts in starts in 2024, multiple Phase 2 readouts over the next 18 months on roughly a quarterly cadence. And our hope is that if our pipeline continues to operate, we’ll be able to meet or exceed that cadence in the future got multiple INDs that we think are going to happen in the near term. On the partnership side, we continue to move forward with our colleagues at Roche Genentech on a really pioneering visionary collaboration and so excited to be working with both the G-red and P-red teams. We’ve got the potential for near-term program and map options on top of the program option we already announced in oncology last fall with our ongoing collaboration with Bayer, we see significant opportunity in the near term in the space of undruggable oncology targets for some program options.

We’ve got a fantastic collaboration with Tempus, and we’ve already identified some pretty exciting targets in the context of non-small cell lung cancer and we’re starting to integrate larger chunks of their data for broader kind of pan-cancer causal AI models that are giving us really exciting hypotheses in oncology, And then as we’ve shared, we see the opportunity for additional transformational partnerships in the context of non-oncology areas, areas perhaps like cardiovascular and metabolism. And so we’ll be looking forward, we hope, to being able to share more details there in the near future. And then finally, as you saw as we shared our Phenom-Beta foundation model for image-based drug discovery with NVIDIA on BioNeMo. We continue to do business experiments with our data, using it as a value driver and have the potential to put some of our data, some of our tools into a variety of different marketplaces, a variety of different partnerships and we hope to be able to share more there soon.

And then finally, our platform we’re moving the Recursion OS from automated discovery, which is where I would argue we are today. Increasingly, workflows and processes that are being driven in an automated way towards autonomous discovery and our low platform that we unveiled at JPMorgan is a stepping stone in this direction towards autonomous discovery, where AI agents will be leveraging the tools that we built at Recursion, both wet lab and dry lab to automatically hypothesize about biology, automatically look for high areas of unmet need and automatically prioritize experimentation to five us the fastest route to impact for patients. We feel like that’s where the industry is going to move, and we want to make sure we’re leading that. And then finally, I just want to share some of the things that I feel like are on our road map in the near term.

Active learning I’ve talked about, proteomics I’ve talked about, but we’re also doing a lot of exploration around the potential for organoids and steroids to help us increase both translation and kind of predictive ADME Tox at scale at Recursion. Those are kind of bottlenecks that we’re working on now. And then, of course, on the automated synthesis side, we continue to think that the time that it takes to synthesize small molecules, 8 to 12 weeks is we’ve been bringing that down through our collaboration with Enamine, but we see a real opportunity to continue to accelerate that through things like automated synthesis and automated microsynthesis. And finally, we’re ending Q1 with nearly $300 million in cash at the end of Q1. And I think that gives us robust runway and Recursion really feels poised with some of these milestones that I’ve just mentioned in the near term.

These potential milestones giving us pretty significant runway extension as we begin to hit those. So we feel like we’re in a really fantastic space, we’re honored to be helping to lead the TechBio evolution as we move biotech into TechBio, and we’re so thankful for all of your questions and support. And with that, I’m going to go ahead and move over to start answering some questions. So let’s dive right in. Looks like we’ve got a question from Dante Noah, Eric Joseph on the team at JPM, Gil Bloom, et cetera, similar question here, and they’re asking, what does success look like for each of your upcoming CCM, NF2 FAP, AXIN1 APC Phase 2 trial readouts and what might your next steps be. And I think just given the time today, I won’t go through each of these programs individually, but what I will share is for each of these programs, we are likely to be first in disease or near first in disease.

And when you have an opportunity like that, I think we really have to work with our colleagues at the agency, work with key opinion leaders, work with patient advocates to look at the sum of the evidence. And of course, we’ll be looking for a therapeutic window, but we’ll be looking for early signals of efficacy across a variety of different readouts in the context of CCM, for example, we could imagine looking for objective improvement in things like hemosiderin deposition around lesions as well as subjective improvements in things like patient-reported outcomes or other kind of neurologist reported outcome tools that we have in the secondary end points. And I think as we look at the sum of the evidence for each of these, we’ll work very closely with key opinion leaders and patients and the FDA.

And what we want to see is moving the biology. If we see that we’re moving in the biology in a way that is going to be meaningful for patients potentially, that’s going to be the signal we want to see to drive forward and have discussions with the agency. And the next steps will be to aggressively pursue whatever it is, we can to move these medicines to patients. In some context, like NF2, it might be moving to start our Phase 3 trial and in consultation with the agency. In other context, we might even have discussions with the agency about the potential for accelerated approval. But we’re going to really need to see what the data looks like, and we’ll be looking forward to reporting that in Q3 and Q4 in the first half of 2025 with more programs coming in the future.

All right. Moving on to another question here. Steve Dechert from KeyBank and Vikram Purohit from Morgan Stanley are asking, how should we think about the significance of your Phase 2 readout for REC-994, in terms of validating your platform and the potential for other programs in your pipeline? This is a great question and one we get asked pretty frequently So Steve, Vikram, what I can say is, I think we’ve already got a lot of leading indicators of the power of this platform. As I’ve shared before, you can go back and look at the paper that we published a preprint in April of 2020, where now we are 9 for 10 at predicting the outcome of FDA-approved drug in the context of SARS-CoV-2 virus, and we made all of those predictions well ahead of time.