Recursion's CEO outlines a two-pronged pipeline strategy. The first prong uses phenomics to uncover novel biological insights for new targets, like their FAP program. The second uses their AI-driven small molecule design platform to improve the therapeutic index for known but historically 'hard-to-drug' targets, like CDK7. This balanced portfolio approach de-risks development by leveraging different strengths of their end-to-end platform.

Gordian Biotechnology embeds unique genetic "barcodes" into hundreds of different gene therapies. This transforms gene therapy from a treatment modality into a high-throughput screening tool, allowing them to test many potential drugs simultaneously inside a single living animal and trace which ones worked.

Instead of testing a single drug candidate in cheap models before moving to expensive ones, Gordian's parallel testing platform makes it cost-effective to use clinically relevant large animals, like horses, at the very beginning of the discovery process. This flips the traditional R&D funnel on its head.

The success of GLP-1s like Ozempic, which address weight loss, addiction, and metabolic fitness, has made the public more receptive to longevity drugs. People now better understand how a single drug targeting a core mechanism (like metabolic health) can have widespread, seemingly magical downstream benefits.

InflaRx's strategy targets the C5a pathway, implicated in many inflammatory conditions. By focusing on this single mechanism, their drug could potentially treat a wide range of diseases, from skin conditions to kidney disease, effectively creating a valuable "pipeline in a drug."

Pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer have vast amounts of human genetic data (GWAS hits) linked to diseases but struggle to determine which are viable drug targets. Gordian's high-throughput in vivo screening directly tests the causal effects of hundreds of these targets, rapidly identifying the most promising candidates.

Unlike using genetically identical mice, Gordian tests therapies in large, genetically varied animals. This variation mimics human patient diversity, helping identify drugs that are effective across different biological profiles and addressing patient heterogeneity, a primary cause of clinical trial failure.

The company intentionally makes its early research "harder in the short term" by using complex, long-term animal models. This counterintuitive strategy is designed to generate highly predictive data early, thereby reducing the massive financial risk and high failure rate of the later-stage clinical trials.

Gordian uses AAV vectors to create a "mosaic" tissue where different cells receive different genetic perturbations. Single-cell transcriptomics then reveals the causal effects of each target in a complex, living environment, a massive speed advantage over traditional, single-target animal studies.