AI Helping Find Promising
Sequoia's Alfred Lin is celebrating Formation Bio's $600M fund — and the underlying thesis deserves attention. His point that AI has accelerated drug discovery while clinical development lags is well taken: the bottleneck has genuinely shifted from finding molecules to testing them.… more
Formation's approach — acquiring clinical-stage assets and running trials with AI-driven infrastructure — is a bet on execution rather than novel discovery, which distinguishes it from Isomorphic Labs or Recursion. One caveat: trial timelines are constrained by biology and regulators as much as by software, so gains will likely be incremental, not exponential. Still, a dedicated vehicle to buy and advance stalled compounds is a clever way to arbitrage the discovery-development gap, and if it works, expect copycats.
AI is helping find promising new drugs faster than ever. The next challenge is making sure those drugs reach patients, and that depends on clinical development keeping pace. That’s the problem @BenjamineYLiu and @lintaho set out to solve when they started TrialSpark in 2016, now @formationbio.
They saw that even high-potential compounds spent muc…
Source:
X — Alfred Lin
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