Cutting through the AI Hype in Drug Discovery - Recursion CSO Dave Hallett on the Genetics Podcast

A clip from Recursion CSO Dave Hallett's conversation with Patrick Short, CEO of Sano Genetics, host of The Genetics Podcast, about the real gains and remaining hurdles for AI drug discovery and development. Drawing on his nearly 30 year experience, beginning at Merck in the mid-1990s, Dave shared how AI has fundamentally changed what’s possible – from research capabilities, to molecule design, to clinical trial planning – but noted that it still can’t change the laws of physics. 🔹Highlights include: ▪️How AI has allowed for true multi-parameter optimization Dave said the shift from single-parameter to true multi-parameter optimization is the biggest change he's seen at the bench. A person can hold roughly six or seven variables in their head at once, he said; a computational system can track far more, without recency bias, across active learning loops. The result: "AI has massively compressed the time and the cost that's required to get from an idea to a candidate." Recursion has seen that show up as roughly 80% reductions in compounds made and 50-70% cuts to time-to-candidate on affected programs. ▪️Simulating trials before running them Rather than copying existing clinical trial protocols, Dave shared how Recursion pressure tests inclusion and exclusion criteria through simulation before a study launches — asking which criteria are actually still fit for purpose. Applied to REC-7735, evaluated in the ZINNIA trial, that process expanded the pool of patients the trial could reach by approximately 20%. ▪️Looking forward with pragmatism and optimism Dave was candid about AI’s limitations, too, noting that the industry is "still a long way" from modeling emergent human pathophysiology at the organism scale. He also discussed Recursion's partnership work on the breakthrough neuro map, and offered advice to early-career scientists: build deep domain expertise while remaining "bilingual" across biology, chemistry, and computation. 👉 Check out the full conversation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BD34s2h64lU #techbio #AIdrugdiscovery #clinicaltrials #biotech #genomics