Recursion Pharmaceuticals readies for a major test in AI-based drugs

SALT LAKE CITY — On paper, Recursion Pharmaceuticals shouldn’t have worked.

The company — or, at least, what existed at its founding in 2013 — hoped to pull data from images of healthy and diseased cells, and use that data to identify drugs gathering dust on pharmaceutical company shelves that could be repurposed as rare disease treatments. 

The founders were a medical school dropout, an entrepreneur whose most recent success was with a custom sign-making e-commerce shop, and an exacting University of Utah scientist. They didn’t have much in terms of intellectual property — their technology was based around two tools widely shared on the internet, free for anyone to use. And the startup was based in Salt Lake City, Utah — an area better known for its ski slopes and connection to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints than drug development.