SALT LAKE CITY, Oct 23 (Bernama-GLOBE NEWSWIRE) — Recursion (NASDAQ: RXRX), a leading clinical stage TechBio company decoding biology to radically improve lives, today announced that the first patient has been dosed in its Phase 2 clinical trial of REC-3964, a potential first-in-class, oral small molecule and new chemical entity for the treatment of recurrent Clostridioides difficile infection. C. diff is a toxin producing bacteria that causes diarrhea and colitis, and can be life threatening. Up to 730,000 cases are estimated to occur in the U.S. and EU5 annually, and the infection is responsible for an estimated 29,000 deaths in the U.S. each year. Recursion’s study will initially address the recurrent C. diff. (up to 175,000 cases in the United States per year) population, which costs the healthcare system approximately two billion dollars per year.
Increasing cases of recurrent C. diff. infections pose significant public health challenges. Antibiotics, the standard treatment for C. diff. infections, disturb the gut microbiome due to their non-selective nature. Despite initial success, antibiotics fail to prevent recurrence in 20-30% of primary cases. Further, the risk of subsequent recurrence rises to 40% after the first and 45-65% after two or more.