The utilization of machine learning is expanding the boundaries in healthcare and American based digital biology company, Recursion Pharmaceuticals is leading the way. The company’s CEO and co-founder, Chris Gibson told Forbes magazine recently that at Recursion they are using robots to perform at least a million experiments every week.
Going against the usual experimentation tactics with the goal of making sick cells healthy, at the Recursion lab, which its CEO calls a warehouse, with the aid of machine learning they have been able to make healthy cells sick and through a variety of ways including taking pictures of the cell and then studying to understand why the cells are different from healthy ones and seeing great results.
The company, which was founded only seven years ago at his arsenal has not only scientists but engineers as well, creating massive datasets. “It’s kind of flipping the first few steps of drug discovery,” Gibson said. “We like to let biology give us the answer.”
Recursion currently has in the works four drugs already being tested on humans. One of them is a medication for neurofibromatosis type 2, a rare disease that involves noncancerous tumors growing in the nervous system, affecting 1 in 33,000 people worldwide, and cerebral cavernous malformations, which are abnormal blood vessels in the brain and affects 0.5% of the world population.