Benjamine Liu

Growing up, I was the biggest Kobe Bryant fan. I was initially drawn to his swagger and confidence on the court, but as I got older what I admired most about him was his extreme work ethic and his mindset of pushing through adversity and never settling for anything less than greatness. Kobe popularized the philosophy of "rest at the end, not in the middle" and the idea that you don’t celebrate until the job is done. You leave it all on the court so you have no regrets when it's over. In fact, amongst my most prized possessions are my Kobe Bryant rookie cards. They mean so much to me that, during fire evacuations in Los Angeles, my parents instinctively gathered them from under my childhood bed where I stashed them.  

The “Mamba Mentality” continues to make an indelible impact on my outlook, shaping how I approach challenges in life and work. It’s why a recent Nike advertisement for Chinese New Year so struck a chord with me. In this upcoming Year of the Snake, or  “Year of the Mamba”, the campaign’s central message is: "Have a hard year."

In Chinese culture, there’s a term called "eating bitterness" (吃苦), which refers to enduring hardship and persevering through tough times. Growing up, my parents celebrated eating bitterness as a necessary part of achieving anything of note. The phrase may seem counterintuitive at first, but it’s rooted in a profound truth: the most rewarding missions require persisting through major adversities. 

The legendary stories of my childhood embodied this theme – I grew up learning about my dad’s journey to America as a high school student. He worked as a busboy in San Francisco overcoming countless challenges — figured things out in a foreign land, learned to master the language, found his way to state college in San Jose, then transferred to UCLA where he excelled, and ultimately provided our family with a better life. Like many immigrants, these stories pushed and inspired me to go the extra distance as I didn’t want to waste the opportunity my parents had sacrificed so much for. 

This Chinese New Year, coming up on Wednesday, feels particularly fitting as we navigate a world rife with challenges. Geopolitically, economically, and socially, we’re facing tests that demand the very values Kobe stood for: hard work, perseverance, and a no-excuse philosophical stoicism. In my industry, for instance, China’s ability to rapidly develop drugs have  become unprecedented, suggesting they will be a formidable challenger to America’s leadership in the decades ahead. In AI, DeepSeek is just one example of China’s ability to innovate and come up to speed rapidly.

As I perused through the Youtube comments on the Nike advertisement, the most upvoted one read: “I already had a hard year.” That comment stayed with me because it was emblematic of the sentiment and culture in parts of America today, in contrast to China, where ‘eating bitterness’ is still a very celebrated theme. (I suspect Nike’s marketing team knew their Chinese audience would respond differently than their western ones).  

As Paul Graham shares, startups don’t typically die by homicide; they die by suicide. Similarly, the rise and fall of great nations often stem from within. While we as Americans can strive to delay others' advancements, the most important thing is to focus on ourselves—to rebuild a culture that celebrates greatness, hard work, and innovation.

Historically, America was the nation that inspired the world, admired for its unmatched work ethic and relentless ambition. We built faster, taller, and stronger because we celebrated those very values that fueled progress. But somewhere along the way, we began to lose sight of that here in the US. 

Over time in America, it became “work smarter, not harder.” We forgot that greatness itself demands obsession and hardship, often at the cost of balance (see Bezos on work-life harmony; see Kobe’s emails to Gordon Hayward). 

Kobe, like the founders and CEOs of today’s most consequential companies such as Tesla, Nvidia, SpaceX, OpenAI, Amazon and Microsoft, embodies a “work smarter AND harder” ethos. It’s not about choosing between the two; it’s about embracing both. This ethos represents more than just a personal philosophy—it’s a culture, a set of values, and a mindset that most determines future success, not only for individuals but for entire nations. 

In the recent and ongoing national dialogue on immigration, I believe a crucial point is missing: this issue isn’t really about a preference for hiring foreign workers. It’s about a desire to find people who still embody the long-held American values of discipline and relentless drive. But I believe we can reclaim these values—and not just return to excellence, but surpass it. The renewed energy and determination we’re beginning to see across the country give me hope that we’re on the path to doing just that. But it means, at this key inflection point for our country, returning to a celebration of a set of values that embrace challenge, hardship, accountability, and results.

As we step into this Chinese New Year, let’s embrace the idea of having a hard year. Let’s remember that the most rewarding outcomes often come from the toughest journeys. It’s through perseverance and grit that we find greatness—just like Kobe did.

As we look to build this generation’s AI native pharma company to transform the speed in which we can get new treatments to patients, I know the journey ahead will not be easy. In fact, nothing about the past 8 (Kobe!) years have been. But I know that with the team and culture that we’ve built, we will strive to make an indelible impact because this is a mission worth eating bitterness for. 

Here’s to a Happy Chinese New Year and a hard year ahead. Let’s make it legendary.

Here is a compilation of 8 of my favorite legendary Kobe stories:

1. Motivation 

2. Hard work outweighs talent 

3. Beginner’s Mindset: always learning/curiosity

4.  Start Earlier: The power of compounding every day 

5. Jobs not finished 

6. Take care of your primary business  

7. Details matter and doing the small things right  

8. Broader compilation

Today, we proudly introduced Muse, our latest AI innovation for drug development—a tool designed to optimize patient recruitment built in collaboration with Sanofi and OpenAI. While many in the industry focus on AI-driven drug discovery, we at Formation Bio are building AI applications and systems to transform the drug development and clinical trials  - the most consequential cost and time bottleneck in bringing new medicines to patients

Muse is an example of how AI systems are beginning to become capable of performing tasks that once required entire teams or organizations. Typically, devising and executing on a patient recruitment strategy requires months of research and implementation that involves teams across patient recruitment, marketing, clinical operations, R&D, legal, and compliance. Muse can perform many of these same tasks in minutes rather than months. We believe AI systems like Muse, applied across all drug development processes, will enable us to drastically reduce the cost and time of bringing new medicines to patients.

Just last week, I shared a Q4 reflection note with the Formation Bio team, reaffirming my belief in AI's transformative potential to reshape drug development. AI is integral to our mission of accelerating drug development, with the ultimate goal of delivering life-changing treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.

I want to share this reflection with my broader community, offering insight into how we think about AI at Formation Bio. This context helps set the stage for our Muse product—another step forward in our mission to set new standards in AI-driven pharma.

Read more »

I am excited about AI’s potential to meaningfully address the drug development bottleneck. At Formation Bio, we have begun incorporating LLMs and AI models in everything we do, and our plans for AI innovation and investment span short, medium, and long term horizons.

At Formation Bio, we are building a tech and AI driven pharma company differentiated by radically more efficient drug development.

As AI accelerates drug discovery, generating more promising candidate drugs than ever before, we believe the most consequential bottleneck to bringing more medicines to patients is the cost and time of drug development and clinical trials. In fact, we started Formation Bio with this thesis in mind: build a pharma company that can run clinical trials and drug development more efficiently.

Potential new medicines only stand a chance to reach patients if they can advance through clinical development, and right now, the clinical development bottleneck severely limits how many drugs our industry can develop. We believe that our AI agents and domain-customized models will dramatically improve the efficiency of many aspects of drug development, and ultimately, enable more new medicines to reach patients.

Our focus on leveraging AI to transform drug development, rather than drug discovery, is less typical in our industry. This article explains why we are focused on this particular part of the biopharma value chain.

We are living in a golden age of drug discovery, however, we will be unable to capitalize on this innovation if drug development remains a bottleneck

The technology revolution across drug discovery and AI is generating more promising drug assets faster and more efficiently than ever before. However, the cost of drug development and clinical trials is only getting more expensive. As a result, the biopharma industry, which can already only advance a fraction of the drugs they discover, will find that more and more promising drugs are shelved for a lack of development bandwidth and resources.

Generative AI presents a number of new and exciting opportunities for drug discovery. Many of the AI-led discovery companies have the ability or potential to discover 25, 50, 100 drugs for the cost and time it takes a more traditional company to discover one drug candidate. However, these companies are only able to finance or develop a small fraction of the drugs they discover. Small biotechs struggle to raise capital beyond their first few clinical stage assets while large pharma have capped R&D spend (i.e., public market investors expect Pharma companies to spend no more than 20% - 25% of Sales on R&D), limiting the number of programs they can develop.

Simultaneously, while drug discovery is getting more efficient, drug development is actually getting more expensive.

There has been a considerable increase in trial costs per developed drug and a 2X increase in clinical trial timelines over the past 40 years. Today, Phase 2 clinical trials can cost $20M-$50M+ and a Phase 3 trial can cost $100M+. This cost limits the total number of drugs companies can develop.

It’s not just cost, but also time that limits our industry’s throughput. Across the standard 20-year patent life for a drug, only 1 - 1.5 years is discovery while 10 - 12 years is development. There is simply more impact to be made in drug development. Speeding up development by 1 year, not only accelerates the potential availability of that drug for patients, but also creates a valuable additional year of patent life.

As a result, many companies end up developing only a fraction of the drugs they discover and countless promising drugs end up stalled in larger pharma and smaller biotechs alike.

Our business model

At Formation Bio, we partner with biotech and pharma companies to enable more of their pipeline to be developed so that more drugs can ultimately reach patients.

We acquire, partner, or in-license clinical stage assets from pharma, research institutions, and biotechs, and provide all the capital and capabilities to get their programs through proof of concept (i.e., post Phase 2 readout) and beyond.

As a result, smaller biotechs don’t have to build out costly drug development teams and can advance more than just their lead assets. For large pharma companies, we can create an “off balance sheet" pathway for development, enabling them to take more shots on goal in a P&L efficient way.

Like others before us, we employ a Hub and Spoke model to create win-win structures with our partners. We structure each NewCo bespoke to partner preferences — which could include equity, upside, or royalties — and provide the capital and capabilities needed to advance the asset. We win when our partners win – we can sell the drug to pharma post Phase 2 readout, find a pharma partner after PoC is achieved, continue to advance the program ourselves, and even commercialize if needed.

A licensing-first approach isn’t new. Companies like Allergan pioneered an ‘external innovation’ strategy where they partnered with biotechs and discovery companies rather than building their own internal discovery efforts. More recently, Hub and Spoke models like Roivant and BridgeBio have scaled and industrialized this approach, creating value not only for their shareholders and partners, but also, and more importantly, for patients.

Our team knows these approaches well. Our Chief Development Officer, Gavin Corcoran was the former Chief Medical Officer at Allergan and we have a number of drug hunters on our team experienced in what it takes to license and acquire promising drugs in a search space where adverse selection and information asymmetry needs to be top of mind as we diligence drug programs.

Where our approach is differentiated is our ability to run drug development and clinical trials more efficiently. As a tech and AI-native company, we’ve built our own, in-house, tech driven CRO, with all the Quality and Drug Development systems, processes, and expertise needed to run clinical trials. We’ve built proprietary technology and data infrastructure that not only allows us to run trials more efficiently but also sets us up to uniquely capitalize on building and training AI models.

Since we founded the company, we’ve been able to show that we can run trials faster and more efficiently. We’ve supported hundreds of studies and have operated across the trial stack – as a recruitment vendor, technology partner, SMO/trial sites, and CRO – and our experiences across each nut and bolt of running trials give us unique insight on how to transform drug development.

While our organization is young by pharma standards, our team members are very experienced in drug development. Across our team and network of advisors, we’ve collectively been involved in 75+ regulatory submissions and 45 approved drugs.

At Formation Bio, we are continually growing our pipeline of drugs, and expanding our suite of partnerships that will help us develop and commercialize drugs most efficiently. In the coming years, we hope to partner with many more companies to provide new pathways for biotech and pharma companies to advance more new drugs to patients.

AI has the potential to transform drug development

We are excited about AI’s potential to meaningfully address the drug development bottleneck.

It doesn't take too much imagination today to see how fine-tuned and customized LLMs can streamline many pharma functions including medical writing, protocol development, biostats, and more. The regulatory function in a pharma company involves synthesizing FDA meeting minutes and publications to best anticipate what regulators may want to focus on based on precedent and ever-changing guidance. Many drug development processes today are highly manual, time intensive, and costly, and AI, coupled with the right human oversight and reinforcement, can automate many of these functions.

We have begun incorporating LLMs and AI models in everything we do. Our plans for AI innovation and investment span short, medium, and long term horizons, and always keep privacy and the best interests of patients in mind.

We are currently working on many projects with shorter term horizons that focus on workflow automation tasks – i.e., enabling 1 person to do their work 10X more efficiently. Some examples of projects include: leveraging AI to generate high-performing patient facing content and pre-screening questionnaires tailored to specific patient cohorts, using AI to assist with producing adverse event reports in minutes rather than hours, building AI-driven recruitment channel strategies that can maximize recruitment speed and patient diversity while minimizing recruitment cost, and using AI models to support optimal study design with populations and endpoints selected to maximize useful evidence generation and reduce overall costs. Fine-tuned models with human experts in the loop can significantly improve these workflows and give our team more leverage to focus on the most strategic aspects of their work.

Our verticality gives us a unique competitive advantage. In the long term, it allows us to think holistically about how pharma can be transformed with AI beyond task-centric point solutions. In this spirit, we are also working on an AI R&D Scientist that can provide decision support and eventually steer higher quality R&D decisions. Finally, to ensure we’re successful in the long term, we are also curating data sets that will allow us to build AI models to better predict toxicity, tolerability, and one day, efficacy.

We recognize that these transformative efforts will not be easy and require expertise that we may not have today. We are looking to partner with the best minds across AI, pharma, and science to realize our mission. Come join us if our mission interests you!

People, culture, and values

Since the company’s inception, it is clear that our people, culture, and values are our biggest competitive advantage. As we look to build a pharma company that will fundamentally transform how we bring new medicines to patients, we will win not because of one specific innovation or technological breakthrough. We will win because we have company culture and values that enable us to consistently innovate and execute with rigor and velocity.

AI is moving at a rapid pace and organizations that are able to move with greater urgency and velocity and balance long term missions with a focus on short term execution will ultimately win. While we have a head start today, we believe slope matters more than y-intercept. It's important for us to continue to stay curious, learn new AI tools faster, and adopt them more aggressively than our peers.

It’s likely that many AI and biotech discovery companies will be funded across the next few years, each with its unique technological and scientific approach. I believe our differentiated strategy focused on drug development will allow us to capture the benefit from this cambrian explosion in drug discovery.

The journey ahead will not be easy. Pharma is a tough space to crack, and progress will not always be linear. But it is a journey worth taking. There are few missions more important than helping humans live longer, healthy, and happier lives, and very few companies have the will, curiosity, and intensity to enact real change. Observing the ingenuity, tenacity, and dedication of our people over the past few years gives me so much confidence that our team at Formation Bio is absolutely up to the challenge.

As we advance on our journey toward building the pharma company of the future, TrialSpark is now officially Formation Bio.

Our early years - and the TrialSpark name - were focused on sparking innovation within clinical trials, building clinical trial technology tools for drug developers, including software and platforms for digital patient recruitment and site management. We subsequently advanced to operating as a CRO, running end-to-end trials for sponsors, leveraging our in-house platform. Then, building on those capabilities, we evolved to acquiring and developing our own drugs.

Our model and capabilities have grown to serve our bigger vision of building the pharma company of the future. Our drug development platform has matured across R&D and tech, and we have established - and continue to grow - our own pipeline of majority owned assets. Now, our brand reflects this identity.

Formation Bio

Formation Bio is setting a new standard for the pace of drug development. We're a tech-driven pharma company, bringing together technical depth, pharma acumen, and an enterprising spirit to shave years off the time it takes to bring new treatments to patients safely.

Together, we are forming a drug development platform that optimizes all aspects of clinical drug development, enabling
more efficient protocol and program design, faster clinical trial completion, and increased quality throughout.

At Formation Bio, everything we do is motivated by the knowledge that every day counts for patients waiting for new treatments.
Time is of the essence. The world is waiting for radically more efficient drug development, and we are answering the call.

What changes to expect

Effective December 5th, 2023 we will be doing business as Formation Bio. We invite you to explore our new website and get a feel for our new visual brand. The back-end transition will take some time, and you may continue to see TrialSpark in some instances. (Software, documentation, billing etc.) The full transition will take place gradually in 2024.

Learn more about Formation Bio’s model here.

We are excited to share that TrialSpark has raised a $156M Series C to support our mission to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.

You can read more about our mission here and here

Despite the sweeping technological advances transforming biotech, it still takes longer than ten years and costs billions of dollars to develop a single drug, contributing to rising drug prices, inflated healthcare costs, and, ultimately, decreased access to treatments for patients.

We believe there is an opportunity to create a new kind of pharma company — powered by technology and driven by a patient-first ethos — that can lower drug prices, expand access to new medicines, and fundamentally change how we deliver new treatments to patients.

Today, the long and expensive clinical trial process is the biggest bottleneck in drug development. In a world where there are more discovered drugs than the industry can develop and no one knows what’s going to work until you run a clinical trial, the ability to run clinical trials cheaper and faster is the most consequential competitive advantage you want as a pharma company. As such, our team of engineers, operational specialists, biopharma experts, clinicians, data scientists, and product designers have built a tech-enabled trial platform that can significantly accelerate trial timelines while democratizing access to research. However, this is only the beginning. We plan to interrogate every aspect of the pharma value chain to find ways to better serve patients.

My co-founder Linhao and I want to thank all of our team members, both current and past, for all their hard work, dedication, and drive to make an impact for patients. We also want to thank our mentors, investors, partners and advisors for their continued support. We feel honored to have the opportunity to work with all of you.

While we are excited about all the progress we have made, we recognize we are still in the earliest stages of our ambitions as a company. We understand that the journey ahead will not be without its challenges, but with relentless focus, rigor, and execution, we are determined to one day make a dent in the universe and fundamentally change how we bring new treatments to patients.

There are several thousand known human diseases, yet we only have FDA-approved treatments for about 500 of them.

Those familiar with Moore’s Law — the idea that computer processing power doubles every two years — may recognize that the above diagram for ‘Eroom’s Law’ highlights an opposing trend in biotech (Eroom is literally Moore spelled backwards). Drug development has become slower and more expensive over time, despite dramatic improvements in technology. In fact, the number of new drugs approved per one billion R&D dollars spent has halved just about every nine years since 1950.

TrialSpark’s mission is to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.

To achieve that goal, we must first target the biggest bottleneck that stands in its way. Before we talk about what that bottleneck is, let’s briefly talk about what it isn’t.

Finding new drug candidates isn’t the problem

This was a fact I didn’t fully appreciate as a graduate student in computational biology. Like many, I believed that the availability of new treatments was limited because there simply weren’t enough drug candidates being researched and discovered. When I began my studies, I was excited about the potential for sequencing, big data, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize the pace of drug discovery.

What I came to recognize is that biopharma doesn’t need more drug candidates — it has plenty of them sitting idly at the top of the drug development funnel. In fact, if we were to stop research today, there are as many as 10 drug candidates for every one drug that makes it to trial. As technological advancements make drug discovery ever more efficient, this pile-up is only going to get worse.

In order to bring treatments to patients faster, the most important bottleneck to fix is actually the one caused by the high costs and long durations of most trials.

How we’re breaking down the bottleneck

TrialSpark is decreasing the time and cost of a clinical trial, allowing a greater number of new treatments to be tested each year.

The first step towards this is recognizing that the clinical trial is a complex logistics problem, requiring a delicate orchestration of procedures, people, and parts defined by a research protocol.

We believe that a technology-first approach — marrying software and data across a single operational layer — can significantly decrease trial timelines. This is the heart of our solution. By adding automation and operational efficiency, we’re able to simplify the logistics and create a faster, more cost-effective trial process.

Technology isn’t the only solution, however. We understand that, at its core, drug development is a deeply human process. No drug is brought to market without a team of visionary doctors, selfless patient volunteers, and pioneering researchers working together toward a shared goal.

Through engagement and empowerment, we’re forging stronger connections between doctors, patients, and the greater biopharma community. We believe these relationships are the key to activating broader participation in trials.

Building a mission-first company

Our mission defines our roadmap and clarifies our purpose. We strive to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently because each and every one of us has family members or friends whose lives are affected by disease.

This is why we are driving so tirelessly towards our mission. Our team knows that time is of the essence — not just because a drug loses up to $5M in net present value each day it remains unavailable — but because that single day can make all the difference to a patient waiting for a life-saving treatment.

However, a mission such as this can only be realized by a strong team of people, empowered to contribute their unique insights and ideas to help solve the problems we will face. We believe our success will be most influenced by the people we can attract to our cause and the values that we promote across our organization.

We believe the companies that stand the test of time do so because they put mission and purpose ahead of ego. They interrogate decisions based on first principles and understand that an ambitious, uncompromising roadmap can only be achieved through a sequence of deliberate and well-executed steps.

These companies understand that the accomplishments of yesteryear have little bearing on future success. They know that they’re only as great as their next hire, their next day, their next quarter, and their next year. This is the template to which our team aspires.

Let's reimagine clinical trials

At the end of the day, we will judge our success not by financial gains, but by the impact we have on the lives of patients and how many new treatments we ultimately contribute to the world.

We are still in the early stages, but we’re so excited for what’s in store. If our values and mission speak to you, we welcome you to join us on this journey. Together, we can fundamentally change how we bring treatments to patients.