Raising Health How to Build This Generation's Big Pharma Company
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Nov 17, 2025 Ben Liu, co-founder and CEO of Formation Bio, talks about revolutionizing drug development through AI and modern strategies. He emphasizes that clinical execution, not discovery, is the bottleneck for drug approvals. Liu explains Formation's hub-and-spoke model for efficient asset management and discusses methods to cut trial costs and timelines significantly. The conversation also covers global competition, especially with China's advancements, and how faster, cheaper development could dramatically increase patient access to new therapies.
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Pick Assets Early And Train AI With Experts
- Focus acquisitions where adverse selection is highest: early clinical (IND to pre-phase-two) where data is sparse and sellers may part with assets.
- Hire top human drug-pickers and use their judgments to train AI weighting for clinical differentiation and evidence.
Psychology Drives Target Clustering
- Psychological clustering causes many companies to chase the same targets, making first-in-class choices risky but valuable when credentialized by data.
- Formation pursues first-in-class when human omics data credibly supports the target, and best-in-class in novel indications.
Turning Long Outcomes Into Surrogates
- Formation acquired a Merck drug that statistically reduced knee replacements but faced regulatory challenges due to long outcomes.
- They built a 40,000-patient longitudinal knee database to validate MRI-based surrogate endpoints for faster trials.