Over the last decade, the number of drug candidates entering development has doubled, yet the number of successful drug approvals remains flat at ~50 per year.

This week, we sit down with Formation Bio founder and CEO Ben Liu. His company has raised more than $600 million to build what he hopes will become the first new enduring pharmaceutical company in decades, powered by AI. Ben explains why he believes clinical development, not drug discovery, is becoming the industry's biggest bottleneck, and how AI could fundamentally change the economics of bringing new medicines to patients.

We cover:

Why there hasn't there been a big pharma company created since the 1980s
Which drug categories Ben believes could become the next GLP-1s and reshape healthcare
Why Formation Bio chose to become a pharmaceutical company instead of selling software
The real bottleneck in bringing medicines to patients
Ben's roadmap for how AI will transform drug development over the next 10 to 20 years

About our guest:

Ben Liu is the co-founder and CEO of Formation Bio. He received his DPhil at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, leveraging machine-learning, AI, and big-data to develop diagnostics and therapeutics for Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. During his graduate work, he observed the way clinical trials bottlenecked the development of new treatments for patients, compelling him to start Formation Bio.

Before Formation Bio, Ben graduated from Yale where he was awarded the college’s highest honor at graduation and received his MPhil with distinction in Computational Biology from the Department of Applied Mathematics and Theoretical Physics at Cambridge as a Paul Mellon Fellow. Ben also serves as an Advisor to Harvard Business School’s MS/MBA Program in Biotechnology.

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Can AI Build the First New Pharma Giant in Decades? | Formation Bio CEO Ben Liu

The Heart of Healthcare | A Digital Health Podcast

Can AI Build the First New Pharma Giant in Decades? | Formation Bio CEO Ben Liu