Splunk Machine Learning Helps Recursion Pharmaceuticals Treat Genetic Diseases

Splunk Inc. announced biotechnology company Recursion Pharmaceuticals is using Splunk® Enterprise and the Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit to reach its goal of treating 100 molecular genetic diseases by 2025. With Splunk, Recursion has combined biological science with machine learning to generate and analyze data from tens of thousands of images of cell cultures and trillions of DNA strands. Watch the Recursion Pharmaceuticals video and learn more about how Recursion is using Splunk to converge science, research and automation to meet the 2025 goal.

Recursion’s legacy management strategy could not keep pace with the large amounts of time-series data that was produced from an increasing number of computer-controlled instruments capturing more than 700,000 TIFF files per week. After evaluating open source alternatives, Recursion used Splunk Enterprise to streamline information gathering and optimize its laboratory procedures. Splunk Enterprise helped scientists realize value in just three days, providing answers to Recursion across a variety of data types produced during the experimentation process including microscope logs, scheduler logs and metrics.

“Splunk Enterprise provides Recursion Pharmaceuticals with the operational visibility, real-time insights, and speed necessary to maintain the breakneck pace at which we are scaling towards our 2025 goal. We receive real-time data that allows us to correlate experimental results with equipment function immediately, not months later,” said Yolanda Chong, vice president of Innovation and Enabling Biology, Recursion Pharmaceuticals. “The Splunk Machine Learning Toolkit equips our biologists and data scientists with critical mechanisms to catch anomalies in laboratory operations and allows us to build easy-to-read dashboards that capture experiment quality over time. The real-time operational insights provide our high-throughput screening team with data they need to efficiently plan and execute experiments, significantly saving the company on operating costs.”

Recursion is automating the traditional experimentation process with innovations built using machine data from connected environments within the laboratory. Robotic instruments produce events and metrics which are ingested into Splunk Enterprise for real-time analysis and visualizations. With this information the team can streamline laboratory operations and perform predictive maintenance on instrumentation. This process allows the Recursion team to better understand how the complex process is operating and make improvements accordingly.

“Recursion Pharmaceuticals exemplifies the life-changing potential of machine learning, and Splunk is honored to help Recursion transform machine data into answers about genetic diseases,” said Rick Fitz, senior vice president of IT Markets, Splunk. “As the volume of machine data continues to grow, organizations often struggle to keep pace with ways to get value from that data. Splunk delivers machine learning functionality across its solutions to remove the ceiling on the value that data can deliver and help organizations use analytics to solve problems that will significantly impact and, in some cases, even save lives.”