"As drug discovery gets more and more efficient, especially with AI, our industry can't develop everything it discovers." This stark assessment from Benjamine Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of Formation Bio, cuts to the heart of a critical bottleneck in pharmaceutical innovation. Speaking with Melissa Lee and Julia Boorstin on CNBC's *Fast Money* during the Disruptor 50 segment, Liu articulated a compelling vision for how AI is not just assisting, but fundamentally redesigning the arduous path from drug discovery to patient access.
Formation Bio, an AI-native pharma company, operates on a unique premise: instead of focusing on initial drug discovery, they acquire promising drug candidates that have stalled in development, often due to the prohibitive costs and complexities of clinical trials. Their strategy is to leverage cutting-edge AI and automation to shepherd these compounds through Phase 2 and Phase 3 trials with unprecedented efficiency, ultimately co-commercializing or reselling them to larger pharmaceutical partners. This approach capitalizes on a significant market dislocation where the pace of drug discovery has far outstripped the industry's capacity to develop and bring those discoveries to market.
Liu provided a tangible example of AI's impact, highlighting their AI system, Muse. He explained that traditionally, assembling a patient recruitment campaign—a task involving PhDs, clinicians, and extensive research into disease areas and patient populations—would take their teams "two months." With Muse, this labor-intensive process is compressed to "a minute, a few minutes with an AI system and a human in the loop," radically shortening timelines and reducing the immense knowledge work involved. This efficiency gain isn't just incremental; it represents a paradigm shift, freeing up highly skilled human capital to focus on more complex, strategic challenges rather than repetitive, data-heavy tasks.
The strategic genius of Formation Bio lies in its ability to exploit the current disconnect between discovery and development. While the past decade has seen a twofold increase in discovered drugs, the number of approved drugs has remained stubbornly flat, hovering around 60 annually. This stagnation is largely attributed to the staggering cost of clinical development, averaging $2.6 billion for each successful drug. Formation Bio steps into this "white space," transforming what were once considered liabilities—stalled drug assets—into valuable opportunities. By drastically reducing the cost and time associated with clinical trials, they unlock the potential of compounds that might otherwise never reach patients.
This isn't merely automation replacing human labor; it's a synergistic integration. Formation Bio combines its advanced AI systems with top-tier human expertise. Liu noted the presence of seasoned professionals like Michael Dolsten, former CSO and President of R&D at Pfizer, whose exceptional Phase 2 success picking rate is invaluable. The AI models are not just performing tasks; they are being trained by these human experts, learning to articulate the rationale behind drug selection decisions. This continuous feedback loop refines the AI's predictive capabilities, creating a virtuous cycle where human intuition informs AI, and AI amplifies human capacity. The potential for job dislocation, a frequent concern with AI adoption, is acknowledged, but Liu posits that for society, this trade-off is fundamentally "worth it" if it leads to life-saving drugs reaching patients faster and more affordably. Formation Bio's vision underscores a future where human ingenuity, augmented by intelligent machines, can overcome long-standing barriers to progress.
