Recursion today announced a grant from the AT-Children's Project to advance it's innovative drug discovery work towards identifying novel treatments for ataxia-telangiectasia, a brutal childhood genetic disease.
Ataxia-telangiectasia (A-T) is a rare genetic disease that attacks children, causing progressive loss of muscle control, immune system problems, and a high rate of cancer. The award will be used to support Recursions efforts to build a many-dimensional cellular model of the disease to be used in future drug screening efforts.
Chris Gibson, Ph.D., CEO of Recursion Pharmaceuticals remarked: We are grateful to the A-T Childrens Project for this award which will enable us to rapidly deploy our innovative drug discovery technology towards Ataxia-telangiectasia. As a young company, the support and trust of foundations like the A-T-Childrens Project is critical to our ability to apply our technology across as many diseases as possible.
Recursions technology, which combines experimental biology and bioinformatics, is especially useful for drug discovery in rare genetic diseases where our understanding of the complete molecular picture of the diseases is lacking. A-T, which is due to mutations in the gene ATM, is just such a disease. Loss of function of ATM results in myriad complex and interconnected molecular changes in cells. Recursion is able to look for structural changes in such cells which can act as a broad readout of the disease.
According to Brad Margus, Volunteer President and Founder of the A-T Childrens Project, Recursions cutting-edge technology is a great match for us. We are eager to identify potential biomarkers, screening assays and therapeutic targets for this brutal disease, and Recursions unique profiling approach will accelerate our progress. And even more exciting, Recursion may learn that already-existing drugs hold promise for kids with A-T.
Rather than starting from scratch trying to discover new drugs, Recursion specifically looks for known drugs that can be recycled as treatments for diseases like A-T. As such, the company hopes to be able to translate laboratory discoveries into treatments for patients at a much faster rate.
About A-T Childrens Project The A-T Childrens Project is a nonprofit organization that raises funds to support and coordinate first-rate biomedical research projects, scientific conferences and a clinical center aimed at finding life-improving therapies and a cure for ataxia-telangiectasia. To learn more about the A-T Childrens Project, visit http://www.atcp.org.
About Recursion Pharmaceuticals - Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC, is a drug discovery company founded in 2013 that seeks to apply an innovative approach to drug discovery to rapidly identify many new treatment strategies for genetic diseases. The companys focus on rare genetic diseases is much-needed, as there are more than 5,000 such conditions that together affect millions of Americans, and more than 95% of these diseases have no approved therapy. Many of these diseases specifically affect children. Recursions novel drug screening platform combines experimental biology and bioinformatics in a massively parallel system to quickly and efficiently identify potential therapeutics. The core of the approach revolves around high-throughput automated screening using microscopy images of human cellular models of disease. Rich data from these assays is probed using advanced statistical and machine learning approaches, and the effects of thousands of known drugs and shelved drug candidates can be investigated efficiently to identify those holding the most promise for the treatment of any one rare genetic disease.
See http://www.recursionpharma.com for more information.
Contact: Recursion Pharmaceuticals, LLC. Chris Gibson, CEO. Phone (801) 587-1629 Email: chris.gibson@recursionpharma.com
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Recursion Pharmaceuticals Announces Funding Support for Ataxia-Telangiectasia