Recursion - Operating System

Infrastructure Layer of enabling hardware and software

The Recursion Data Universe, which houses our diverse and expansive datasets

The Recursion Map, a suite of proprietary discovery, design, and development tools

Combined, the Recursion OS enables us to explore foundational biology unconstrained by human bias, navigate to new biological insights, and rapidly accelerate programs. Our People & Culture transcend the entire OS as the fuel that brings it to life.

‍The foundational layer of the Recursion OS is a highly-synchronized network of enabling hardware and software used to design, execute, aggregate and store 11 petabytes of rapidly growing biological and chemical data. We built the core elements of our infrastructure based on cutting-edge technology created in the last several years and continue to adopt new technological advancements within each component.

Biological Tools
To build models of human disease and explore biology at scale, including: CRISPR gene editing, soluble factors, live viruses and more

Chemistry Tools
Including thousands of known chemical entities, hundreds of thousands of NCE chemical starting points and on-going exploration into additional modalities (e.g. antibody, protein and RNA-based therapeutics)

Cell Culture
Including state-of-the-art facilities and equipment to culture, store and utilize massive quantities of diverse human cell types and patient-derived cell lines for discovery and validation experiments

Lab Robotics
Highly-scalable, automated laboratory robotics workflow that enables us to conduct up to 1.5 million experiments each week for up to 50 weeks per year

Data Capture
State-of-the-art hardware to capture high-dimensional, multimodal biological and chemical data from our experiments, including high-throughput microscopes, sequencing systems, and continuous video feeds from cameras embedded in custom animal study cages

Technology Stack
Highly scalable, advanced computational resources enabling us to move, store, process and secure ‘petabyte-scale’ data assets in both public and private cloud environments

Experiment Design
Enabling software tools that empower our scientists to design an increasing number of experiments each week and ensure data relatability across time

Experiment Execution and Quality Control
Enabling software tools to orchestrate the execution of up to 1.5 million experiments each week while simultaneously monitoring quality to maintain a productive flow of data

Phenomics
Cellular microscopy images that capture composite changes in cellular morphology

Orthogonomics
Scaled transcriptomic and proteomic datasets used to validate the activity of compounds and further elucidate the mechanism by which drug candidates may be acting

Bespoke One-Off Assays
Custom assays for program-specific validation

ADMET Assays
Large-format absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicology data that enable us to identify and predict early liabilities

InVivomics
Sensor data and continuous video feeds from cameras embedded in custom animal study cages and used to collect more holistic measurements of animal behavior and create abstract representations of in vivo disease states

A rapidly growing suite of in-house software applications designed to process and translate data from the Recursion Data Universe into actionable insights for our research and development teams to accelerate programs. These tools cover a broad set of uses including:

Data Processing
Tools to manage and monitor the streaming of data to the cloud at scale, transform our images into mathematical representations through our in-house proprietary convolutional neural networks, and perform standard and custom analyses

Biological and Chemical Activity Assessment
Scaled transcriptomic and proteomic datasets used to validate the activity of compounds and further elucidate the mechanism by which drug candidates may be acting

Program Insight
Tools that translate processed data into actionable insights, enabling us to infer tens of billions of relationships among biological and chemical perturbations

Program Acceleration
Tools that equip our teams with valuable information as they optimize therapeutic starting points into viable drug candidates, including in silico hit expansions based on 3D virtual screens and dense structure activity relationships as well as tools to augment in vivo experimentation

Program Insight in action
Central to this suite of tools is our PhenoMap, with which we can infer billions of relationships in silico among thousands of diverse biological perturbations, including CRISPR gene knockouts, soluble factors, viruses and hundreds of thousands of small molecules that have been screened on our platform. These relationships can be used to inform novel drug targets or early therapeutic compounds to start new discovery programs.

Program Acceleration in action
Scaffold Shopper can compare candidate compounds identified by our platform to over 12 billion ready-to-synthesize and off-the-shelf molecules based on our 3D chemical functionality and shape-based similarities, within a matter of minutes and at low computational expense.

By applying the Recursion OS to drug discovery, Recursion expects to turn drug discovery from sequential trial-and-error into a search problem.