On October 15, 2026 Recursion (Nasdaq: RXRX), a leading clinical-stage TechBio company decoding biology to radically improve lives, reported that Sanofi has optioned the first development candidate from the two companies’ multi-program research collaboration.

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The option triggered a $10 million milestone payment to Recursion, bringing total upfront and milestone payments received from Sanofi under the collaboration to $144 million; Recursion is eligible for more than $300 million in additional milestones under the program, with double digit royalties on net product sales, if approved.

"The most important test of any technology platform in drug discovery is whether it can translate into differentiated medicines," said Najat Khan, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Recursion. "Together with Sanofi, we tackled a difficult design problem against a dual target product profile with high potential and delivered a molecule that Sanofi has now selected for its development pipeline. With additional programs advancing across our collaboration, this milestone is another important demonstration of how our platform can translate computational capabilities into differentiated medicines — and do so repeatedly."

The potential first-in-class oral small molecule was designed to achieve a differentiated profile against a challenging dual target implicated in inflammatory disease. Optimizing for this target pair required navigating complex and competing chemistry constraints to achieve the desired balance of drug-like properties. The candidate was delivered by the combination of Recursion’s integrated AI-enabled drug design platform and small-molecule chemistry capabilities with Sanofi’s deep expertise in drug discovery and immunology. Recursion applied multiple computational design approaches across iterative cycles of prediction, chemical design, synthesis, and experimental validation to rapidly explore and optimize a complex chemical space.

"By combining Sanofi’s drug discovery and clinical and translational knowledge in Immunology with Recursion’s AI-driven platform, we were able to move with speed and precision in a space where that balance is notoriously hard to achieve," said Alyssa Johnsen, Therapeutic Area Head, Development, Immunology & Inflammation, Sanofi. "This new development candidate has potential to deliver a differentiated oral medicine with highly selective dual targeting that could be a meaningful advance for people living with inflammatory diseases who still lack adequate treatment options."The candidate has now been added to Sanofi’s development pipeline and is expected to enter phase 1 clinical trials in 2027, with Sanofi funding and leading further development and commercialization to advance the program toward patients.

Building a growing portfolio through the Recursion-Sanofi collaboration

The Recursion-Sanofi collaboration was established to discover and advance a portfolio of potentially first- and best-in-class small molecule medicines across immunology and oncology by combining Sanofi’s deep therapeutic-area and drug-development expertise with Recursion’s integrated capabilities across biology, AI-enabled molecular design and chemistry.

With the first development candidate optioned, the collaboration has now achieved six progress-based milestones across five programs. Sanofi’s selection of the development candidate triggered a $10 million milestone payment to Recursion, bringing total upfront and milestone payments under the collaboration to $144 million to date.
Recursion remains eligible for more than $300 million in additional milestones for this program, with an average of low double-digit royalties on net product sales if successfully commercialized. The $10 million milestone payment will be recognized as revenue in the third quarter of 2026, and ends Recursion’s operational requirements related to this candidate, with all future payments resulting in profit to Recursion.
Additional programs across the collaboration continue to advance. Over the next 12 months, other programs in the joint portfolio have the potential to reach development candidate and other progress-based milestones.

(Press release, Recursion Pharmaceuticals, OCT 15, 2026, View Source [SID1234673488])