26 June 2019 - - US-based biotechnology company Recursion, a specialist in artificial intelligence for drug discovery and development, has appointed Sharath Hegde, Ph.D. as its chief scientific officer, the company said.
Hegde has more than 28 years of leadership experience at the intersection of drug discovery and clinical development and has seen multiple drugs from discovery through FDA approval.
Hegde has participated in the discovery of several New Chemical Entities, including now-marketed products Yuperli and Vibativ as well as clinical candidates currently in Phase 2 and Phase 3 development.
He joins Recursion after more than 15 years at Theravance Biopharma, a company that has been successful in building a diversified portfolio with the core purpose of creating medicines to help improve the lives of patients with serious illnesses.
Dr. Hegde first joined Theravance in 1999 where he rose from positions of increasing responsibility across pharmacology and biology into his most recent role as senior vice president of Research.
Prior to Theravance, Hegde spent nine years at Syntex Corp., later acquired by Roche. He obtained his Ph.D. in Pharmacology from the University of Houston and his B.Pharm/M.Pharm from the University of Mumbai.
As part of his anticipation of a broader industry trend, Hegde evaluated and studied the intersection of technology and biology in depth before choosing to move to Recursion.
Hegde joins several senior leaders at Recursion in migrating from the San Francisco Bay Area to Salt Lake City. Called Silicon Slopes, the Greater Salt Lake City area is increasingly being recognized as an international high-tech hub, able to attract incredible entrepreneurs and substantial venture funding.
Since its founding in 2013, Recursion has built one of the world's largest datasets mapping human cellular biology, using high-content imaging, and advanced two of its ML-discovered small molecules into clinical trials.
The company plans to advance additional programs into clinical development, on its own or with partners, over the next 18 months.
Recursion is a clinical-stage biotechnology company combining experimental biology and automation with artificial intelligence in a massively parallel system to efficiently discover potential drugs for diverse indications, including genetic disease, inflammation, immunology, and infectious disease.
Recursion applies causative perturbations to human cells to generate disease models and associated biological image data.
Recursion's rich, relatable database of more than two petabytes of biological images generated in-house on the company's robotics platform enables advanced machine learning approaches to reveal drug candidates, mechanisms of action, and potential toxicity, with the eventual goal of decoding biology and advancing new therapeutics to radically improve lives.