Recursion CEO: Publicly funded research built the biopharma industry. Now it needs our help

Companies with resources must bridge the gap

This op-ed was first published in STAT Feb. 19, 2025: https://www.statnews.com/2025/02/19/nih-research-funding-cuts-indirect-costs-sbir-recursion/?

America is the global leader in health care innovation. We lead in medical research and in rapidly developing treatments for emerging health care priorities. That leadership isn’t free. But it isn’t very expensive, either. At this critical moment, those of us most invested in this industry’s future may need to help shoulder the cost. In the early 1990s at Stanford, Ronald Levy was working on his vision of a therapy that could train the immune system to attack cancer cells precisely, avoiding the collateral damage of chemotherapy. His research focused on monoclonal antibodies, proteins designed to lock onto cancerous B cells and destroy them.?

To turn the science into a realworld treatment, Levy had co-founded IDEC Pharmaceuticals, a small biotech startup. IDEC applied for and received a series of Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health to move the project forward. By 1991, IDEC had produced rituximab, a monoclonal antibody specifically targeting B-cell lymphomas. In 1997, Rituxan became the first monoclonal antibody therapy approved for cancer treatment. It transformed care for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, offering a highly targeted, more effective therapy with fewer side effects than traditional treatments. Rituxan was the first of a new class of monoclonal antibody therapies, now used to treat cancers, autoimmune disorders, and other illnesses. Economically, the payoff from the early grants has been enormous — Rituxan generated more than $6.7 billion in global sales in 2019 alone, and monoclonal antibody therapies now fuel hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity.?

More importantly, these drugs have extended and saved countless lives. Rituxan’s story is one of many that proves that early public investment in biotech can drive life-changing breakthroughs, creating not just better medicine, but entire industries. Other NIH grants led to the technology behind the first Covid-19 vaccine, AIDS treatments, the HPV vaccines, and thousands of other breakthroughs we take for granted today, like advancing CRISPR technology.

The company I founded, Recursion, was launched in part with support from NIH and SBIR grants as well: The research that led to Recursion’s founding was funded by NIH R01 and other grants awarded to the laboratory where I completed my Ph.D., and after we founded the company, we secured $3.5 million in NIH SBIR grants, which helped us get off the ground. Since then, Recursion has raised more than 400 times that amount in private investment — over $1.1 billion — to advance our platform and improve the way drugs are discovered.?

Today, we are a $4 billion publicly traded company with eight therapeutics in clinical trials, more than 10 in advanced discovery and research, and development partnerships with some of the biggest biopharma companies on the planet. We still have a lot of work ahead of us before we make the impact we envision: pulling the rest of the industry forward in its use of AI, bringing new treatments to market, and lowering health care costs. And while we are making fast progress against our mission, one thing is certain: We wouldn’t be here today without the early support from publicly funded grants.?

On the whole, every dollar of NIH funding gives back more than two dollars to the economy. Is there inefficiency in the NIH and the grant system that helped advance monoclonal antibody technology, my own company, and countless others? Absolutely, and we should work to eliminate wasteful spending. But we also need to be extremely careful to wield a scalpel and not an axe so as not to damage America’s significant lead in biomedical research as we do so, nor cut off the significant financial benefit to our country in the process. Additionally, America’s lead in health care innovation is under new pressure. While the U.S. remains the epicenter of groundbreaking research, China is rapidly advancing in the biopharma sector. If we’re not careful, we could find ourselves dependent on other nations for the treatments that have historically been developed here.?

Our edge is fragile, and we must do everything we can to protect it. Unfortunately, recent policy changes are rapidly choking off or adding uncertainty to critical funding paths, including the SBIR program. According to publicly available data on SBIR’s website, around 1,500 health-related startups that were counting on these grants to generate the early data that could help them go on to raise private funds are now in limbo. These companies — many of which could be the next great American medical breakthrough — now face an uncertain future because they are stuck between halted funding and a lack of private investment.?

I am confident that aggressive and forward-looking NIH funding will be restarted eventually. Perhaps it will be done more efficiently, with less waste. Until it does, some of our brightest innovators and entrepreneurs are in jeopardy, as is a great engine of our economy. But there is something we can do — a stopgap to keep the biotech innovation pipeline flowing until public funding returns. Those of us in the industry with the resources to help should step up to help keep the money going for the next generation of innovators. I’ve always felt it is important for companies and leaders to give back to the paths that helped us get started.?

For our part, Recursion launched Altitude Lab four years ago as an incubator for local biotech startups in Salt Lake City. We don’t take any equity. We provide laboratories, offices, programming, mentorship and community. We do this work because we believe that building an iconic company like Recursion happens best in a community of other companies building the future. Our startups have gone on to raise more than $150 million in the past three years, more than 50% of all life science dollars in Utah since we opened Altitude. I also spend a lot of time in the evenings and on the weekends mentoring a cohort of about 30 young biotech startup CEOs, mostly by sharing all the mistakes I’ve made and offering an ear when they face a challenging time.?

Now I am ready to shoulder more load by launching Altitude Lab Fund, a pre-seed venture fund, as an urgent response to the current SBIR funding situation. Altitude Lab Fund intends to invest in a group of top biotech companies from around the country that are specifically affected by the SBIR funding gap. Recipients will join the Salt Lake City biotech ecosystem and receive $100,000 to $250,000 in pre-seed capital, plus a grant of 12 months of lab and office space, and admission to Altitude Lab’s competitive accelerator program which includes exclusive mentorship with leading industry executives and access to top-tier national funds.

We hope that by leading through this gap we can do our part to keep America the frontrunner. The NIH and the American government have had a special role to play in funding some of the audacious early science that has made America the leader in biotech and beyond for the past 100 years. While private funds cannot and should not replace the critical funding from the NIH and other public entities, neither can we afford to allow a setback to cut off the flow of early science that has made every single biotech company in the country possible.?

If policymakers fail to act swiftly to restore this funding, then it’s up to us to bridge the gap. I’m eager to share what we’ve learned in launching Altitude Lab Fund and to collaborate with others who are committed to sustaining biotech innovation during this uncertain time. The future of American health care innovation is hanging in the balance. Funding research is an investment in the economic strength, global leadership, and health security of the United States. We have seen the enormous returns that early-stage NIH grants have delivered — from mRNA vaccines and anti-cancer therapies that saved millions, to biotech companies that drove job creation and economic growth.?

I invite others who recognize the value of biomedical innovation to find ways to support emerging biotech research, whether through direct funding, incubator programs, or partnerships with local and regional development offices. America’s leadership in health care innovation is worth fighting for. So are the patients who count on it.?

Chris Gibson is co-founder and CEO of Recursion.