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

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 genome."

He went on: "Whereas we generate these representations of the real world to the tune of half a billion experiments, on the computational side we're building world models that represent those. And if we are successful in building those world models at some point we get a transposition... where the world model becomes a virtual cell, and then instead of the wet lab supporting the dry lab, the dry lab becomes the engine for the hypothesis and the wet lab becomes the validation tool."

What’s needed now, he added, is “more boldness and courage to go after big swings.”

⏱️ TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Intro
00:11: Biopharma Companies Need to Lift One Another Up
01:13: Building Virtual Cells Begins with High Quality Datasets
01:47: Combining Wet Lab and Dry Lab
02:23: The World Model Becomes the Virtual Cell
02:52: 3 Essential Layers for the Virtual Cell
04:04: From Cellular Imaging to Algorithms
05:00: TechBio Demands More Boldness & Big Swings