Recursion Unveils BioHive-2, Fastest Pharma-Owned Supercomputer

With BioHive-2, Recursion plans to accelerate its AI-driven drug discovery processes. The company has generated and aggregated one of the largest biological and chemical datasets globally, which is used to train new AI models. The increased computational power of BioHive-2 allows Recursion to train larger and more generalizable foundation models and AI agents more efficiently. This advancement supports the company’s efforts to industrialize drug discovery.

Recursion has also developed new foundation models, including Phenom-1, a deep-learning model designed to extract biologically meaningful features from images of cells. The training of Phenom-1 required several months of computational time using BioHive-1, but with BioHive-2, multiple AI projects can now be executed in parallel in shorter timeframes.

Additionally, Recursion released a smaller model, Phenom-Beta, for external use through NVIDIA BioNeMo, a generative AI cloud-based platform. Phenom-Beta processes cellular microscopy images into general-purpose embeddings and was trained using the RxRx3 dataset, which contains approximately 2.2 million images of HUVEC cells.

See also: The Growing Momentum for AI Foundation Models in Biotech and 12 Notable Companies

Recursion’s Nvidia-based platform has enabled the development of a large protein-ligand interaction prediction dataset, predicting the protein targets for approximately 36 billion chemical compounds. This has been part of a collaboration with Enamine to generate compound screening libraries.

Investors responded positively to the launch of BioHive-2, with Recursion’s stock rising by 10% on Monday, May 13th. This supercomputer, along with Nvidia’s Eos system, underscores the impact of accelerated computing and generative AI on the pharmaceutical industry, propelling it into a new era of advanced drug discovery.