Recursion is a Salt Lake City–based company using AI and scientific innovation to discover and develop new medicines for people living with diseases that often have few or no treatment options, including rare diseases. Around the world, an estimated 300 million people are affected by a rare disease, yet only about 5% of rare diseases currently have an approved treatment, which is why this work matters so deeply to the team at Recursion.
One program that brings this to life is Recursion’s work in familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP), a rare, inherited condition where people develop hundreds to thousands of polyps in their colon and rectum by their late teens or early twenties. Without constant monitoring and major surgeries, those polyps have a near-100% risk of turning into colorectal cancer. Today, there are no approved medicines that change the underlying course of the disease, leaving families to navigate a lifetime of invasive procedures, hospital visits, and uncertainty.
Recursion is developing an investigational medicine called REC-4881 that aims to offer, for the first time, a treatment option for people living with FAP. The program emerged from one of the earliest versions of Recursion’s AI platform, which identified a novel approach to treatment that had not been investigated clinically before. Early clinical trial results have shown encouraging signs, including significant and durable reductions in polyp burden, offering a new sense of hope in a disease where surgery has long been the only option for managing cancer risk and disease progression.
In rare diseases like FAP, the scarcity of available data can be a challenge. Recursion addresses this gap by combining its own data with real-world evidence to better understand the full burden of managing the disease and what typical disease progression looks like over time. For its FAP program, the company integrated patient data from thousands of medical records and long-running registries to paint a clearer picture of how often people need procedures, how their disease progresses, and where the healthcare system is falling short — insights that can guide smarter trial designs and, ultimately, better care. These natural history data showed that when left untreated, FAP patients experience predictable polyp growth every year, providing important context for the magnitude of benefit observed in the REC-4881 trial
Recursion’s roots are in rare disease, and the company continues to see this community as central to its mission. By pairing cutting-edge science and technology with the lived experiences of patients, families, advocates, and clinicians, Recursion aims to help bring more life-changing treatments to people who have been waiting far too long for options — in Utah and around the world.
You can learn more about Recursion at recursion.com.