Where Will Recursion Pharmaceuticals Be in 5 Years? The AI Drug Discovery Revolution

AI meets biology in a high-stakes race to reinvent drug discovery.

The Digital Lab Revolution

Recursion's automated wet labs generate over 2 petabytes of biological data weekly—crunching through drug candidates at speeds traditional pharma can't match. Their platform screens thousands of compounds simultaneously, identifying potential therapies for rare diseases that big pharma overlooks.

Clinical Pipeline Acceleration

Five ongoing clinical trials target neurofibromatosis and cerebral cavernous malformation—conditions affecting fewer than 200,000 Americans each. The platform's predictive algorithms cut years off traditional development timelines, though skeptics note most AI-discovered drugs still face the same regulatory gauntlet.

Market Position & Competition

While legacy pharma spends billions on R&D for single-digit success rates, Recursion's capital-light model attracts partners like Roche and Bayer. Their stock remains volatile—typical for pre-revenue biotech—but institutional backing suggests confidence in the platform's long-term potential.

Wall Street's favorite new narrative: disrupting the $1.5 trillion pharma industry while conveniently ignoring that 90% of drug candidates still fail. The real test comes when AI-discovered drugs face real patients—and the FDA's unforgiving approval process.

Image source: Getty Images.

What Recursion Pharmaceuticals does

Recursion Pharmaceuticals uses AI to improve the process of discovering and developing drugs, making it easier and more cost-effective. Most medicines that enter clinical trials never reach the market. Others that get that far barely generate enough sales to justify the investment made by their pharmaceutical companies.

Using an AI-powered algorithm that tests compounds against a VIRTUAL library of human genes, Recursion hopes to improve the success rate of therapies that enter the clinic. The company would be able to launch successful medicines while spending less money than its peers, potentially leading to higher profits and margins compared to industry averages.

Recursion also hopes to generate revenue by licensing its operating system (OS) to other pharmaceutical companies.

Potential catalysts

The company has been a pioneer in using AI-powered algorithms to advance drug development, and this method is now gaining some traction. Earlier this year, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration announced it WOULD gradually phase out animal testing in favor of other methods, including AI-powered models.

In the next few years, there will be a growing need for the kind of approach Recursion uses; that could lead other companies to seek out its services or, at the very least, to make collaboration agreements. That's especially the case since Recursion partnered withto build the most powerful supercomputer in the pharmaceutical industry.

The drugmaker could also benefit from clinical progress. Its pipeline features four products that are currently undergoing clinical trials, with several more in pre-clinical studies. Recursion has partnered with several pharmaceutical leaders, including,,, and. Any clinical progress it can make may trigger milestone payments from these partners, potentially encouraging them to double down on their collaborations with Recursion.

It would also provide evidence for the soundness of the company's approach, which might attract even more collaborators. Under this scenario, Recursion would likely perform well through 2030. It might launch one or two products on the market, make significant pipeline progress elsewhere, license its AI-powered OS to other companies, and sign partnership deals to develop drugs using its approach with others.

Reasons to be cautious

Recursion Pharmaceuticals doesn't yet have a single approved product. While the company is correct that the process of developing drugs is complicated and expensive, it has yet to demonstrate that its approach can yield better outcomes -- and until it does, the market is unlikely to reward the stock.

Recursion was founded in 2013, so it's been a while. And worse, it doesn't currently have a single medicine in late-stage studies. Its record is hardly a good commercial for the superiority of its strategy.

Furthermore, the company may face increasing competition as several companies are working on similar projects. recently launched TuneLab, an AI-powered drug discovery platform. The pharmaceutical giant is making TuneLab accessible to select smaller biotech companies free of charge.

Lilly has a considerable advantage. It's a much larger company and has access to a mountain of data from its past clinical successes and failures. And making TuneLab accessible for free will grant it even more data to improve its AI models. Can Recursion overcome that kind of competition in the next five years? It's hard to bet on it, considering the company's very modest successes so far.

So, where will the stock be in five years? There is a (small) chance that Recursion's drug discovery engine will finally take off and produce at least decent results. In that case, the stock will soar.

However, Recursion Pharmaceuticals could also lose significant market value by 2030 as it struggles under the weight of clinical failures and increased competition for AI-powered drug discovery models. In other words, the stock looks risky, and only investors comfortable with significant volatility should even consider initiating a small position.