Recursion, a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery, published in Nature Genetics scientific findings that highlights a potential limitation of CRISPR-Cas9 in gene editing - a key component in understanding disease mechanisms, and developing new therapeutic approaches.
Published open-access today in Nature Genetics, “High-resolution genome-wide mapping of chromosome-arm-scale truncations induced by CRISPR–Cas9 editing” identifies novel evidence of a proximity bias in CRISPR-Cas9 gene knockouts and a debiasing (correcting) algorithm.
SALT LAKE CITY, May 29, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Recursion (Nasdaq: RXRX), a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery, today published in Nature Genetics scientific findings that highlights a potential limitation of CRISPR-Cas9 in gene editing - a key component in understanding disease mechanisms, and developing new therapeutic approaches.
This proximity bias, discoverable through Recursion’s proprietary biological dataset, could have many downstream impacts on the community’s ability to make meaningful progress in our understanding and treatment of disease within both large scale datasets and small gene-specific work.
CRISPR-Cas9 is a revolutionary technology that can be used as “molecular scissors” to edit the human genome. Upon investigation of the massive datasets within the Recursion OS, Recursion identified large-scale structural changes to the genome – chromosomal truncations – caused by CRISPR-Cas9 editing. The Recursion team subsequently confirmed the widespread presence of this effect in several widely-used public data resources, and, using proprietary datasets and its full stack techbio platform, developed and demonstrated a correction method to analytically mitigate this proximity bias in CRISPR screen datasets at scale.
Recursion applies CRISPR to systematically “knockout” or delete each of >17,000 individual genes in cells as part of its phenotypic screening process. High-dimensional measurements of the edited cells, such as microscopy or scaled transcriptomics, are integrated using proprietary AI to build “maps of biology” to infer biological pathways and uncover new approaches to treating disease. This methodology is applicable across a wide swath of biology, with Recursion’s internal discovery pipeline and our external partnerships.
“Over several years, Recursion has built both unique scale and experience of working with CRISPR-Cas9. By combining the massive scale enabled by Recursion’s phenomics platform with our highly sensitive AI models for image analysis, we were able to discover a subtle bias in CRISPR-Cas9 with meaningful consequences for drug discovery and gene editing. We’re excited to share with the community not only these findings but also potential solutions to improve the quality of inferences from large-scale public data,” shares Imran Haque, PhD, Senior Vice President of AI and Digital Sciences.
About Recursion
Recursion is a clinical stage TechBio company leading the space by decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Enabling its mission is the Recursion OS, a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological, chemical and patient-centric datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry unconstrained by human bias. By commanding massive experimental scale — up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly — and massive computational scale — owning and operating one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world, Recursion is uniting technology, biology, chemistry and patient-centric data to advance the future of medicine.
Recursion is headquartered in Salt Lake City, where it is a founding member of BioHive, the Utah life sciences industry collective. Recursion also has offices in Toronto, Montreal and the San Francisco Bay Area. Learn more at www.Recursion.com, or connect on X (formerly Twitter) and LinkedIn.
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