Podcast: Building an operating system for drug discovery

You may have heard of facial recognition technology but what about face recognition for cells in your body? This is one of the many technologies that Recursion Pharmaceuticals uses as part of its industrialisation of drug discovery.

Deep learning algorithms can tell the difference between healthy and diseased human cells and use this to identify new medicines.

Up until the recent past, drug discovery was a trial and error process that could take years and years. Technology has changed this field of medical research beyond recognition.

Companies like Recursion Pharmaceuticals generate around 1.8 million experiments on a weekly basis, using robotics and deep learning algorithms to model disease in the laboratory.

“Back in the day, when I was in a lab pipetting cells and other things from test tube to test tube, I’d be lucky to maybe generate a dozen good data points in a week,” said Tina Larson, president of Recursion Pharmaceuticals.

“The opportunity is to industrialise drug discovery. The best of the tech industry and the best of all of these tools – like CRISPR – that are in the life sciences industry now, [in order] to really change the way we discover medicine.”

Scaling drug discovery with big data

This is about scaling drug discovery, in part through working with enormous amounts of data, she explained. The company currently has a dataset of 9 petabytes, more than the sum of all high definition movies ever made. And their data pipe is larger than the Twitter firehose. This is where medicine is headed: Faster, cheaper, and more accurate than ever before.

“The opportunity is to industrialise drug discovery,” said Tina. “The best of the tech industry and the best of all of these tools – like CRISPR – that are in the life science industry now, to really change the way we discover medicine.”

Tina Larson, President, Recursion Pharmaceuticals was in conversation with Ashley McKimm, Editor-in-chief of BMJ Innovations at the British Medical Journal on the HealthConf stage at Web Summit 2021.

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Main image: Web Summit