Gibson, who holds a PhD in Bioengineering from the University of Utah, founded Salt Lake City-based Recursion Pharmaceuticals in 2013, with an ambitious goal: to discover 100 drugs by 2025, using computer vision and a highly automated lab to drastically cut the time and cost of bringing a new drug to market. Recursion can run roughly 100,000 mini-experiments every week, dosing samples of “sick” cells with an array of potential treatments, taking a digital “snapshot” of the resulting reaction, and using machine-learning software to identify the most effective drug candidates. Recursion has already compiled one the largest databases of biological images in the world, which it uses to improve its predictive algorithms. The company’s approach was validated when, in 2018, they received FDA clearance to begin Phase I clinical trials for REC-994, a compound they’d identified to target cerebral cavernous malformation, which affects more people than cystic fibrosis. Six other drug candidates are in preclinical studies, and Recursion is working on more than 50 other potential drugs with drugmakers including Sanofi and Takeda.

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