Recursion Pharmaceuticals and Enamine announced today a strategic collaboration that has generated 10 enriched screening libraries containing over 15,000 newly synthesized compounds. These libraries are designed to accelerate drug discovery against 100 key and clinically relevant drug targets in difficult-to-address biological areas.
The partnership, announced on April 9, 2025, leverages Recursion's artificial intelligence and machine learning platform, the Recursion OS, with Enamine's REAL Space, which is recognized as the world's largest source of make-on-demand small molecules.
"We have been using the Recursion OS to identify compounds across Enamine's vast chemical space for our own internal discovery needs," said Chris Gibson, Co-Founder and CEO of Recursion. "This collaboration allows us to extend that approach to areas of biology that are of general interest to the industry. We are bringing together the best of both worlds—Enamine's vast chemical library and Recursion's AI-driven drug discovery platform to help expand the drug discovery toolset."
Navigating Vast Chemical Space with AI
Enamine's REAL Space represents an expansive chemical library built on insights from millions of parallel syntheses. The space currently contains 64.9 billion make-on-demand molecules that can be synthesized within 3-4 weeks, with a high feasibility rate of over 80%.
While this chemical space offers tremendous potential for drug discovery, its sheer volume makes it challenging to select the most promising candidates. The collaboration addresses this challenge by using the Recursion OS to predict small molecule compatibility with protein targets, enabling the creation of smaller, highly focused libraries that outperform traditional high-throughput screening (HTS) collections.
Andrey Tolmachov, CEO and Founder of Enamine, emphasized the significance of this approach: "Enamine's REAL has enormous discovery opportunities. While it has previously been utilized in ultra-large virtual screening campaigns, it has never been explored at scale across multiple targets. Our partnership with Recursion allows us to tap into their cutting-edge technology to rapidly uncover novel compounds with high potential in various research fields rapidly."
Technical Implementation and Commercial Availability
The curated compound libraries resulted from a research collaboration where Recursion gained access to tens of thousands of compounds that it individually predicted may interact with functional areas of biology not addressed by its current 1.2 million compound library. In exchange, Recursion helped develop libraries of broad commercial interest.
These libraries are now commercially available through Enamine's website. The compounds are designed to be rapidly synthesized on demand, with analogues readily accessible from the REAL Space collection.
Computational and Experimental Scale
Recursion's approach combines massive experimental capacity—up to millions of wet lab experiments weekly—with substantial computational power. The company owns and operates one of the world's most powerful supercomputers dedicated to drug discovery.
This computational and experimental scale enables Recursion to generate and analyze one of the world's largest proprietary biological and chemical datasets. The Recursion OS platform uses sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from this dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across biology and chemistry.
Industry Impact and Future Directions
The collaboration represents a significant advancement in the application of artificial intelligence to drug discovery. By combining Recursion's AI capabilities with Enamine's extensive chemical library, the partnership aims to address challenging biological targets that have historically been difficult to drug.
The focused libraries are expected to significantly reduce the time and resources required for hit identification in drug discovery programs. This approach could be particularly valuable for targets in emerging therapeutic areas or those that have proven resistant to traditional drug discovery methods.
As pharmaceutical companies increasingly adopt AI-driven approaches to drug discovery, collaborations like this one between Recursion and Enamine may become more common, potentially accelerating the pace of therapeutic development across the industry.
The new compound libraries are now available for researchers and drug developers through Enamine's website, providing the broader scientific community with access to these AI-curated chemical collections.
