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Chris Gibson

Co-Founder and Former CEO, Recursion Pharmaceuticals

Search every verified Chris Gibson interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. Chris Gibson, co-founder and former CEO of Recursion, discussed the company’s approach to drug discovery in an August 2026 podcast appearance. He described Recursion’s laboratory capabilities, stating that it can conduct up to 2.2 million experiments per week using automated systems. Gibson noted that the company has knocked out every gene in the human genome across multiple cell types and uses imaging and other high-dimensional data to train neural networks aimed at understanding gene and protein relationships. He also mentioned partnerships with Roche Genentech in neuroscience and oncology, and with Bayer in fibrosis, describing these as collaborations to uncover new targets and co-develop treatments before partners take them into clinical trials. Gibson reflected on Recursion’s history, including its founding from his MD-PhD work at the University of Utah, and discussed the company’s strategy of building its own pipeline while partnering on large, expensive therapeutic areas such as Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and ALS. He attributed the acceleration of drug testing to converging advances in genetics, computing, artificial intelligence, and mRNA technology. Gibson also offered advice to academics considering industry roles, saying that industry can be fulfilling and that academic work should not be entirely ruled out.

Recent appearances

  • A Hypothesis-Agnostic Approach to Accelerating Drug Discovery - Dr. Chris Gibson, Co-Founder and ...

    August 12, 2026 · 📺 Osmosis from Elsevier

    “I’m currently sitting 100 feet away from a giant lab full of robots where we can do up to 2.2 million experiments a week,” says Dr. Chris Gibson, the Co-Founder and CEO of Recursion, a company whose mission is to create a more efficient path to drug discovery. You are going to hear a lot of mind-boggling numbers from Chris in today’s Raise the Line episode, but they all boil down to this: advances in genetics, computing, artificial intelligence, mRNA capability and other technologies are all converging to accelerate the testing of drugs at an incredible pace. This is particularly good news fo…

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  • From PhD Research to Multi-Billion-Dollar Biotech Startup: Chris Gibson on Recursion’s Origin

    June 01, 2026 · 📺 University of Utah Technology Licensing Office

    How did PhD research at the University of Utah become a multi-billion-dollar biotech startup? In this Startup Launchpad conversation, Chris Gibson, co-founder and former CEO of Recursion, shares the origin story behind one of Utah’s most prominent biotech companies. Gibson discusses how early research in Dean Li's lab at the University of Utah led to the founding idea for Recursion: using machine learning, AI, and biological imaging data to discover new medicines. Chris reflects on the earliest days of building Recursion, from leaving the MD-PhD path to pursue a startup, to securing NIH SBIR…

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  • TechBio Talks Episode 2: Broad Institute's Anne Carpenter with Host Chris Gibson

    October 01, 2025 · 📺 Recursion

    In the second episode of TechBio Talks, host Chris Gibson talks to Anne Carpenter, Institute Scientist and Imaging Platform Senior Director at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, a pioneer in image-based profiling, who played a key role in Recursion’s origin story. Anne talks about her early discovery that phenomics-based profiling could be as powerful as mRNA profiling; how she decides what data to make by determining the problems she can solve well; how these tools can be deployed to produce safer chemicals; the critical role of open science in advancing new technologies; and why the…

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  • Ep114: Chris Gibson on Industrializing Drug Discovery

    June 11, 2025 · 📺 The Long Run with Luke Timmerman

    Chris Gibson, co-founder and CEO of Recursion, on using new tools to industrialize drug discovery.

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  • AI & Machine Learning | Dr. Chris Gibson

    May 27, 2025 · 📺 Good Medicine Podcast

    In this episode of the podcast, Dr. David Bearss sits down with Dr. Chris Gibson, Co-Founder and CEO of Recursion. Dr. Gibson shares his journey from graduate research at the University of Utah to building Recursion into one of the most advanced AI-driven drug discovery companies in the world. They discuss the intersection of biology and machine learning, the future of drug development, and how Recursion is leveraging massive proprietary datasets and the most powerful supercomputer in pharma to reshape the healthcare landscape. Sponsors BioHive: ⁠https://www.biohive.com Galvan: https://www.g…

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  • Recursion Trial Update with CEO Chris Gibson, Ph.D.

    March 14, 2025 · 📺 Alliance to Cure Cavernous Malformation

    Join Chris Gibson, Ph.D., CEO of Recursion, for an update on REC-994, the first drug trial designed specifically for CCM patients. He’ll share the latest trial progress, what it means for the community, and what comes next. Tune in to learn more about this important step toward a potential treatment. Please note: The Q&A session was not recorded.

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  • From World Model to Virtual Cell: Recursion CEO Chris Gibson at Recursion's JPM Era of TechBio Event

    February 12, 2025 · 📺 Recursion

    Closing remarks from Recursion cofounder and CEO Chris Gibson at Recursion's Era of TechBio event at the San Francisco Mint during the 2025 J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. Chris closed the night by talking about how Recursion is building a true combination of wet lab and dry lab that is paving the way for the first true virtual cell. "What we've believed for the last 11 years at Recursion is that what you have to do is build datasets," he said. "Those datasets have to be really, really high quality and they have to have scale, spanning not just one disease at a time but the entire genom…

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  • Recursion CEO on $688M Exscientia acquisition: Hope to bring better medicines to patients sooner

    August 09, 2024 · 📺 CNBC Television

    Chris Gibson, Recursion co-founder and CEO, joins 'Squawk Box' to discuss the company's $688 million acquisition of Exscientia, ...CHRIS GIBSON, CO-FOUNDER OF INCURSION WHICH ANNOUNCED THE ACQUISITION OF A SMALLER RIVAL IN AN ALL ...

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  • Chris Gibson Presents "State of Recursion" at Download Day 2024

    June 28, 2024 · 📺 Recursion

    Recursion's Co-founder & CEO Chris Gibson, PhD presents "State of Recursion" at Download Day 2024. About Recursion: Recursion is a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Central to its mission is the Recursion Operating System (OS), a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological, chemical and patient-centric datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of searchable relationships across bi…

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  • Fireside Chat: Recursion CEO Chris Gibson & Nvidia's Jensen Huang at Recursion's Download Day

    June 28, 2024 · 📺 Recursion

    NVIDIA Founder & CEO, Jensen Huang, sits down with Recursion Co-founder & CEO, Chris Gibson for a Fireside Chat at Download Day 2024. About Recursion: Recursion is a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to industrialize drug discovery. Central to its mission is the Recursion Operating System (OS), a platform built across diverse technologies that continuously expands one of the world’s largest proprietary biological, chemical and patient-centric datasets. Recursion leverages sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to distill from its dataset a collection of trillions of…

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  • Download Day 2024 Full Day

    June 28, 2024 · 📺 Recursion

    Recursion’s Download Day 2024 is the company’s second R&D Day. Sell-side equity research analysts, institutional investors, and investment bankers joined members of Recursion’s executive team and board of directors for an engaging, in-person event at the company’s headquarters in Salt Lake City, Utah. The day consisted of presentations on Recursion’s technology, science, pipeline and partnerships. This is the full recording of that day on June 24th, 2024. Agenda: 00:00:00 — Welcome Ryan Kelly Chief Communications Officer — Recursion 00:01:28 —State of Recursion Chris Gibson Co-Founder…

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  • Recursion CEO Chris Gibson talks integrating AI into drug development process

    June 24, 2024 · 📺 CNBC Television

    Chris Gibson, Recursion Pharmaceuticals CEO, joins 'Closing Bell Overtime' to talk its partnership with Nvidia, its investors day, drug discovery and more. For access to live and exclusive video from CNBC subscribe to CNBC PRO: https://cnb.cx/42d859g » Subscribe to CNBC TV: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBCtelevision » Subscribe to CNBC: https://cnb.cx/SubscribeCNBC Turn to CNBC TV for the latest stock market news and analysis. From market futures to live price updates CNBC is the leader in business news worldwide. Connect with CNBC News Online Get the latest news: http://www.cnbc.com/ Follow CN…

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Notable quotes

“It's probably less than 10 bucks to test each drug disease combination. So for each disease, if you're testing 5,000 drugs, then you're talking $50,000. Not so terrible. You got to do it in a pooled way to make it like financially efficient. So if there's thousands of diseases, then you're talking on the order of maybe three or $400 million to do all the testing. You got to find the phenotypes first. I mentioned the ”

“I would love to see every existing drug tested for every existing rare disease because for all we know there are thousands of rare diseases. Most of them have not had a scientist dedicated, much less hundreds of scientists dedicated to them. And for all we know, they might actually be relatively easy to cure or treat with existing drugs that we've already got available to us. So, okay, so that's a nice experiment, bu”

“I think the when when you see the power of these technology tools, even back 10 years ago when we saw the power, it makes it really hard to feel like there's not going to be an exponential shift in this field. And the question is where we are on that curve. Um, and I think, you know, as bold and ambitious as the comments uh that Deus made were on that 60 Minutes episode, I do think we are somewhere in the range of se”

“The pitch was that in biology structure suits function and if we can generate a massive library of images of biology and we can get really good at doing computer vision, we could decode biology. And the business pitch was that we were going to repurpose medicines. So there's all these thousands of medicines that people have tried to take to the clinic or to the market that have failed for a variety of reasons. and we”

“What we see in the high dose is actually there's 1-234-567-8910, patients out of the 21 so nearly half of the patients who saw their their lesion get smaller over the course of 12 months. And you can compare that here with 12345, so roughly 25% of the patients in the placebo group, so basically twice as many patients in the high dose treatment group saw their lesion decrease in size. Now, what was a little confoundin”

“We're the first company that's ever gone to the FDA to do a phase two trial. So there was not a clear regulatory framework for us to work in. There wasn't somebody the FDA who could say, hey, you know another company just ran a trial here, and we are. We previously negotiated with them. What the best things to measure are, you should replicate that. We actually got to work with our partners at the FDA, and they are f”

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