In 2020, we acted boldly to contribute data to the scientific community in hopes it would be useful in fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. We partnered with a biosafety level 3 facility to infect a variety of human cells with live SARS-CoV-2 virus, and used our platform to investigate the therapeutic potential of a library of approved drugs. We released our findings as an open-source dataset for the scientific community in April of 2020, which can be downloaded here.

Following our initial dataset release, we used our platform to model and screen for therapeutics that can treat the most severe forms of COVID-19 that have progressed to acute respiratory distress syndrome (ARDS). We modeled the cytokine storm associated with late-stage COVID-19, treated it with a library of approved drugs, and in August 2020, released the first morphological dataset representing inflammatory effects and potential treatments in the context of COVID-19 ARDS, along with a preprint of our findings.

We have also released some of the largest open-sourced biological datasets in the world, the RxRx series, under terms that allow for broad academic and non-commercial use. As part of the series, we also released a preprint that demonstrates the capabilities of Recursion’s platform to model complex immune biology and screen for new therapeutics. To explore our released datasets, please visit our website at www.rxrx.ai. Our contribution to a greater understanding of human biology is just as important as the medicines we advance.