How Recursion Used AI to Find a Novel Way to Potentially Treat a Debilitating Rare Disease

A new video shares the story of Recursion’s investigational drug REC-4881 for the rare disease familial adenomatous polyposis (FAP) which affects more than 50,000 people in the US and EU5 and has no approved medicines. Patients with this disease develop hundreds to thousands of polyps in their early teens to 20s that, if left untreated, have a nearly 100% risk of developing into colon cancer. ⬇️ Here’s how we did it: ▪️ Using the Recursion OS platform to analyze cell morphology, we tested thousands of compounds to find drugs that restored FAP-diseased cells to a healthy state. ▪️ This led us to REC-4881 — a drug that blocks a biological pathway called MEK1/2 – a new approach for treating FAP that had not been investigated clinically before. ▪️ Now, we’re using the full Recursion OS 2.0 platform — including our ClinTech real-world evidence – to fully understand disease burden and guide our clinical strategy, allowing us to expand patient eligibility for our trial. 💡 The takeaway: This program is the first clinical validation of the Recursion OS, and demonstrates our ability to translate unbiased phenotypic insights into potentially differentiated treatments for diseases with high unmet need. Read the full summary data in our December 8, 2025 press release here: https://ir.recursion.com/news-releases/news-release-details/positive-phase-1b2-results-ongoing-rec-4881-tupelo-trial-0 #TechBio #AI #drugdiscovery #raredisease #fap