Chris Gibson
Management
Hi, everybody. My name is Chris Gibson, Co-Founder and CEO of Recursion, delighted to be joining you on our L(earnings) today. And I'm joined by our Chief R&D and Commercial Officer, Najat Khan and the Interim CEO and I hope very soon to be CSO of Recursion, Interim CEO of Exscientia and soon to be CSO of Recursion Dave Hallett. We are coming to you live from Oxford, UK. We are in the Exscientia facility, where behind me, they are using a closed loop automated synthesis platform for chemistry to advance new medicines towards patients and we're just delighted to be sharing the news today that our two businesses have announced a combination. What I would like to do today is walk through first that combination together with Dave and Najat and I'm going to start by talking about some of the complementary factors that we see. First, a pipeline of nearly 10 or approximately 10 readouts over the next 18 months in the clinic. I think this is a really important milestone for a company like Recursion, a company that is trying to prove this next generation of medicines, a new way to discover medicines, and being able to generate this quantity and quality of potential readouts in the coming quarters, I think is going to be really, really fantastic. Next partnerships. Recursion has some incredible partnerships with large companies like Roche, Genentech and Bayer. Our partners at Exscientia have fantastic partnerships with companies like Sanofi and Merck, KGA. And we are just delighted not only for the opportunity to combine our businesses and work against all of these partnerships, but actually to deploy the tools and technologies, the teams that we will be assembling against the partnerships of our counterparties. And I think this deal, in many ways, will make Recursion perhaps a partner of choice for others in the industry. Finally, our platform. Our platforms at Recursion really focused on exploration of biology, hit discovery, target discovery. We've been building that for over a decade, and our colleagues at Exscientia have really been building for about the same amount of time this incredible precision chemistry platform. The ability to go from a hit to a development candidate with active learning and automated synthesis, is really, really exciting to us and putting these two platforms together, we think, is going to put us on the cutting edge. And finally, when we combine these businesses, we believe that we will have not only the team, the tools and the technology to go to the distance, but we'll also have the resources to do that. At the end of Q2, the companies combined have roughly $850 million, which we believe, with the right kind of operational synergies, puts us on a runway into 2027. And finally, the most important piece is the people. Both of these businesses have been building and pioneering the technology, biology interface for the last decade or more, and we think we have some of the best teams in the industry. And by combining our businesses, we're going to be able to take these two incredible teams, put them together and this is definitely, as Dave likes to say, definitely a situation, we believe, where 1+1 equals 3. So I want to dive into the pipeline just a little bit, give you a little bit more depth there. What I think is most exciting and important about the pipeline, beyond the 10 potential readouts in the next 18 months, is the complementarity. These are pipelines that have really no therapeutic overlap, where the two companies are both focused to some degree on oncology, but Recursion really focused in rare disease, infectious disease, and our colleagues at Exscientia are really focused in immunology beyond oncology. That's a fantastic opportunity in the combined business for us to expand the reach. Through our partnerships, we also were able to go after a number of additional areas as well. Of course, Recursion, given our focus on biology, has really gone after first in disease, first-in-class type targets. And our colleagues at Exscientia, I think, have done a tremendous job of going after some of the hardest chemistry on targets that the world is really, really excited about, really best-in-class tools and technology. And by putting these together, we believe that this organization is going to be in a position to bring first and best-in-class medicines to patients and drive down the cost of discovery. So I want to turn to Najat, who just joined us, boy just a few weeks ago. It's been quite a whirlwind. Let's talk a little bit about the pipeline of the proposed entity with these 10 programs that may read out in the next 18 months. Najat?