In this episode, Ed is joined by Ben Taylor, Chief Financial Officer and President of Recursion UK, to discuss how AI is reshaping drug discovery, biotech, and the future of medicine.<br><br>Ben explains how Recursion uses AI, lab automation, biological data, and machine learning to improve the way new medicines are discovered and developed. They explore why drug discovery has such a high failure rate, how AI can open up new areas of biology, and what this could mean for healthcare over the next decade.

How Recursion Is Using AI to Rethink Drug Discovery

Opto Sessions – Invest in the Next Big Idea

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**Podcast:** Opto Sessions – Invest in the Next Big Idea

## Transcript

Hello everyone, we've got Ben Taylor on the show today, Chief Financial Officer and President of Recursion UK, bringing more than two decades of healthcare, finance and biopharma transaction experience, including senior roles at Accenture, Goldman Sachs and Barclays. At Recursion he helps lead the company's financial strategy and UK presence as it advances its technology enabled drug discovery platform. How are you doing today Ben? Great, thanks for having me on.

Where are you calling from? Are you based in the UK? I am, yeah, well I technically live in London, although I'm on the road so much sometimes it feels like this is just where I change the clothes in my suitcase. The company's based out of US, is that right? So we've got a good mix actually. So the Legacy Recursion headquarters was in Salt Lake City, the Legacy Accenture was in the UK.

And so we have large operations in both and then we also have some smaller offices around including New York, which is where our CEO is. Okay, okay. And just for everyone who doesn't know the company, I thought we'd just give a brief overview of what Recursion is. So if you could do that, that'd be great.

Yeah, of course. I'll keep you really tight. Basically, we use AI and lab automation to improve the quality and efficiency of making novel medicines and thereby improving the probability of success of really getting that idea into a final drug that can be used with patients. Mm-hmm. And I think I'm right in saying you're coming across from Accenture in a relatively recent merger. Yes.

What's changed at Recursion or how has that influenced the company at large? Yeah, it was really transformational all around both for us and I think for the industry as well. So Recursion and Accenture were both two of the leaders in the AI drug discovery and development space.

And they had started around the same time almost 14 years ago now, but really focused on two different areas. So Recursion and focused on the biology, Accenture focused on the chemistry, and how do you take AI and lab automation to get to better solutions than were traditionally possible.

And so both companies had developed their own internal pipelines, partnerships, as well as a fairly large platform. And by bringing them together, what we created was the ability not only to find novel targets, but also then create the drugs that could be used to hit those targets.

And that's a really important part. So not only the idea, but also the translation into a real product. And since then we've actually been able to take the expertise, both companies have a little different expertise in some of the AI and the capabilities. So we've been able to bring that together and we built out a clinical technology platform as well to really round it out. And we applied that to all of our clinical trials also.

Yeah, I've been excited to have this interview because obvious...

How Recursion Is Using AI to Rethink Drug Discovery

Transcript

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How Recursion Is Using AI to Rethink Drug Discovery

Transcript

Built for investment professionals

Every day you wait, your competitors are findingedge in conversations you're not hearing.

Every day you wait, your competitors are finding
edge in conversations you're not hearing.