Recursion Pharmaceuticals, an emerging biotechnology company announced it hired Dr Martin Brenner, DVM, as Chief Scientific Officer.
Dr Brenner joins the company after 17 years in the pharmaceutical industry, most recently as the VP and Head of Research & Pre-clinical Development at Stoke Therapeutics.
Previously, he held the position of executive Director at Merck where he founded a new research team and led the early Diabetes & NASH portfolio.
Dr Brenner joins Recursion at an important juncture as the company has validated and is scaling its innovative artificial intelligence (AI) enabled drug discovery platform and prepares to advance more than 100 therapeutic programmes through early discovery and into preclinical development.
With more than a decade of drug discovery experience at world class pharmaceutical companies such as Eli Lilly, AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Merck, Dr Brenner brings extensive industry experience and distinguished scientific leadership to the Recursion team.
Under the scientific leadership of Dr Brenner, Recursion will continue to expand its innovative biology discovery platform into new therapeutic areas such as immunology, oncology, and cardiovascular and metabolic, to advance treatments for dozens of genetic diseases to patients with unmet medical need.
Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion, said: "We are thrilled to have Martin join the team, as his rich drug discovery experience and demonstrated ability to build high-functioning scientific teams will have a major impact on our short term success as we seek to translate our first discoveries to the clinic. But beyond the value of Martin's experience in the short term, he brings with him a burning ambition that aligns perfectly with Recursion's longer term mission to decode biology to radically improve lives."
"With the bold goal to find 100 new treatments by 2025, Recursion has put a stake in the ground to help patients suffering from a wide range of rare diseases and beyond," said Brenner. "And I am truly excited to join an incredible team and apply my drug-hunting experience to help achieve this goal. Beyond our work to bring treatments to patients in the near term, I am ecstatic about the potential for augmenting proven technologies like phenotypic screening with AI to open entirely new paradigms in this industry."
Recursion Pharmaceuticals' discovery platform harnesses the power of automated biology and artificial intelligence to repurpose drugs and shelved assets, as well as discover new chemical entities, mapping them to rare conditions, diseases of inflammation and immuno-oncology. The potential of the platform to bring new treatments to conditions much faster than previous methods has positioned the company in the high-growth stage it is in today.
