Source: Oudiya Pharmaceuticals
Artificial intelligence drug pioneer Oudian Pharmaceuticals It said Wednesday that one of its experimental treatments has achieved a major breakthrough.
Recursion was able to use its AI-powered drug discovery platform to identify an area of biology to target for solid tumors and lymphoma, match it to a drug candidate and move forward to gain regulatory approval to begin studies in less than a minute. From 18 months.
“We think this is a really exciting proof point, not only for us as a company, but I think for the biotech industry as well,” Chris Gibson, CEO and co-founder, said in an interview with CNBC.
The FDA has approved an Investigational New Drug Application for the Phase 1/2 clinical trial of an investigational drug candidate known as REC-1245. The company said that the potential market for this treatment could reach more than 100,000 patients in the United States and the European Union.
The trial will evaluate the safety and tolerability of REC-1245 and will begin in the fourth quarter of this year. Data from the first phase of the dose-escalation portion of the study could be completed by the end of next year, the company said.
The drug will target RBM39, which Recursion said appears functionally similar to a well-known but difficult-to-target marker known as CDK12 to treat advanced biomarker-rich cancers such as ovarian, prostate, breast and pancreatic cancer.
“I think what's really exciting about this Recursion program is that this small molecule and new target basically came out of the equivalent of a Google search, out of this giant map of biology that we've already built,” Gibson said, referring to the Recursion program. Huge datasets created by Recursion over the past 11 years.
“This is the first program that came from that,” he continued. “It's the first program that actually takes advantage of many of these new tools that we've built into a single module.”
There is great hope that AI can significantly speed up drug discovery and make it less expensive by eliminating some of the time-consuming trial and error processes during screening and selecting drug candidates. But investors wanted to see that the reality could live up to the hype.
Stocks recursive year to date
Recursion, which counts Nvidia among its investors, has seen its stock fall 38% in 2024. But the stock is still 60% below the 52-week high it reached in late February.
The company plans to merge with an artificial intelligence drug discovery company Excludewhich will allow it to harness more data. The deal is expected to close early next year.
The majority of analysts rate Recursion shares, but two analysts have a buy rating on the stock, according to FactSet. The average analyst price target of $10.14 implies a return of 64%.
