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The Street
The Street
Business
Ian Krietzberg

Cathie Wood picks up nearly 2 million shares of struggling, cheap stock

Cathie Wood's Ark Invest has been boosting its bets in biotechnology lately, one of several disruptive sectors that Ark grants investors exposure to. 

Ark's flagship Innovation fund on Monday picked up 1,888,812 shares of Recursion Pharmaceuticals (RXRX) -), a purchase worth roughly $12.3 million. 

This latest boost to Ark Innovation's Recursion holding comes about two weeks after Ark picked up some 3.7 million shares in the company

Related: Meet the biotech company Cathie Wood bought half a million shares of this month

Ark's $39.74 million holding in Recursion, made up of a total of around six million shares, makes up .5% of the ETF. The fund is led still by Ark's enormous holdings in Coinbase (COIN) -), Roku (ROKU) -) and Tesla (TSLA) -), which together make up 27.71% of the ETF. 

Recursion, which was founded in 2013, is a biotech company focused on the discovery and development of drugs specifically designed to treat rare diseases. The company aims to take advantage of innovations across biology, chemistry, engineering, data science and automation to achieve those goals. 

In line with that, Recursion in July announced a collaboration with semiconductor giant Nvidia (NVDA) -) meant to help Recursion take advantage of artificial intelligence to aid in its drug discovery efforts.

Nvidia invested $50 million in Recursion as part of the partnership. 

And on Nov. 9, Recursion entered into a collaborative deal with Tempus which will grant Recursion access to Tempus' 20-petabyte (20,000 terabytes) collection of oncology data, which includes DNA, RNA and health records. Recursion will pay Tempus $160 million in cash or equity over the next five years for this continued access. 

The pharmaceuticals company at the same time said that it was "substantially expanding" its BioHive-1, Nvidia-powered supercomputer, adding hundreds of Nvidia GPU chips to the system. This boost, the company said in a statement, will place its supercomputer among the 50 most powerful supercomputers in the world. 

Recursion said the new and improved version of BioHive will be up and running in the first half of 2024. 

Related: Cathie Wood snaps up nearly 4 million shares of Recursion Pharmaceuticals

Reporting third-quarter earnings results Nov. 9, the biotech company came in below Street expectations, posting $10.5 million in revenue, a drop from the $13.2 million it earned in the year-ago period. 

Noting greater expenses, Recursion reported a net loss of $93 million, well above the $60.4 million loss it reported during the same quarter last year. 

Recursion has developed several potential drug candidates so far, but none have come out of clinical trials. 

The stock has been struggling lately, falling steadily from the July highs it posted on the initial news of Nvidia's investment. Lifting somewhat after posting earnings earlier in November, shares of Recursion have since stumbled. 

The stock closed the previous session down 4.81% to $6.53. Shares of Recursion are down around 15% for the year. 

Related: Cathie Wood explains why she cut Ark's Tesla holding

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