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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Discovery Team Ran Into Pharma's Development Limit
- As a grad student, Ben's team discovered Alzheimer's candidates and found pharma had more candidates than they could afford to develop.
- That experience convinced him the bottleneck was costly clinical development, not discovery.
Development, Not Discovery, Is The Bottleneck
- Drug discovery output doubled in 10 years while annual approvals stayed ~50, revealing a development bottleneck.
- Ben Liu argues the competitive advantage now lies in running clinical development cheaper and faster, not discovery.
Use A Hub-And-Spoke Development Model
- Build a tech-enabled development engine and license pre-phase-two assets rather than doing discovery.
- Use a hub-and-spoke model to advance assets to post-phase-two inflection and then sell or co-commercialize.