NEW
YORK, June 26, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Formation
Bio, a tech-driven and AI-native pharma company, announced today
that it has raised $372MM of Series D financing. The financing was
led by a16z with significant participation from Sanofi. Current
investors also joined the round, including Sequoia, Thrive, Emerson
Collective, and Lachy Groom, along with new investors, such as SV
Angel Growth and FPV Ventures. This round reflects a material
step up from the company's Series C valuation. As part of the
financing, Scott Kupor, Managing
Partner at a16z and Alfred Lin,
Partner at Sequoia will join Formation Bio's Board of Directors
alongside existing board director Michael
Moritz, Sr. Advisor to Sequoia Heritage and board observer
Kareem Zaki, Partner at Thrive
Capital.
![Formation Bio (PRNewsfoto/TrialSpark) Formation Bio (PRNewsfoto/TrialSpark)](https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2293357/TrialSpark_Formation_Bio_Logo.jpg)
"We are thrilled to partner with the
Formation Bio team on their journey to build an AI-enabled pharma
company," said Scott Kupor, Managing
Partner at a16z. "Pharma represents one of the biggest industries
in the world, and there is immense potential to make the drug
development process more efficient. We've been impressed by the
team and culture that the co-founders, Ben and Linhao, have built,
one that brings together the best of pharma, tech, and AI to
ultimately make an enduring impact for patients."
Formation Bio is differentiated by its tech and AI enabled
approach that drives more efficient drug development. Advancements
in AI and drug discovery are creating more candidate drugs than the
industry can progress because of the high cost and time of clinical
trials. Recognizing that this development bottleneck limits the
number of new medicines that can reach patients, Formation Bio
(launched in 2016 as TrialSpark) has built technology platforms,
processes, and capabilities to accelerate all aspects of drug
development and clinical trials. The company partners, acquires, or
in-licenses drugs from biotechs and pharma companies and develops
those programs past clinical proof of concept and beyond.
The company plans to allocate the new capital towards two
primary objectives: acquiring and in-licensing candidate drugs and
expanding their AI capabilities.
Acquiring and in-licensing drug assets
Formation Bio plans to deploy this new capital to continue
acquiring and in-licensing clinical stage assets from biotech and
pharma partners.
By partnering with Formation Bio, smaller biotechs can advance
more than just their lead asset, creating a pathway for other drugs
in their pipeline. For large pharma companies, Formation Bio
creates an "off balance sheet" pathway for development, enabling a
company to take more shots on goal in a P&L efficient way.
Formation Bio creates win-win structures for its partners,
leveraging a NewCo model for every asset which can facilitate
shared ownership and outcomes, while providing all the capital and
capabilities needed to advance the assets through their next phases
of clinical development.
Applying AI and technology to drug development
Today, the biggest bottleneck of enabling more drugs to reach
patients is the cost and time of drug development and clinical
trials. Since its founding, Formation Bio has focused on building
the technology, operations, and processes to streamline all aspects
of drug development.
Through its tech-enabled operational model, Formation Bio has
been able to run clinical trials significantly faster and more
efficiently than industry benchmarks by streamlining activities
such as study startup, participant recruitment, data management,
database lock, and study close out.
Because of their tech, data, and operational foundations,
Formation Bio has been able to rapidly integrate LLMs, AI models,
and applications throughout its platform. While many drug
development processes today are highly manual, time intensive, and
costly, Formation Bio is working toward a future state where
fine-tuned and customized LLMs, coupled with expert human oversight
and reinforcement, can automate many of the core drug development
functions. Some examples include: medical writing, protocol
development, biostatistics, report generation, regulatory
intelligence and much more.
Formation Bio's plans for AI innovation span short, medium,
and long term horizons. In the short term, the company is focusing
on workflow automation. Two examples include: AI-generated patient
recruitment content tailored to specific cohorts and AI-generated
adverse event reports that are created in minutes rather than
hours. In the medium term, their focus is on training AI for
augmented decision making within drug development. The company is
building an "AI R&D Scientist" that can provide drug
development teams with decision support and eventually steer high
quality R&D decisions. And, in the long term, the company's
goal is to build and train AI models that can better predict
toxicity, tolerability, and one day, efficacy.
Last month, Formation Bio announced a new collaboration with
OpenAI and Sanofi to jointly design and develop customized AI
solutions for drug development, which is a first-of-its-kind
collaboration within the pharma and life sciences industries.
"At Sanofi, we're all in on AI," said
Paul Hudson, CEO at Sanofi. "And we
are proud to partner with and invest in Formation Bio, whose
AI-driven drug development vision and capabilities will help lead
our industry forward in the shared ambition to accelerate and
improve how we bring more new medicines to patients."
Operating at the intersection of tech and
pharma
As a tech and AI-enabled pharma company, Formation Bio has
focused on building a team and culture that leverages expertise
across pharma, AI, and technology.
"We are in the early stages of AI driving
significant efficiencies in pharma and biotech, and Formation Bio
is well-positioned to lead this transformation," said Alfred Lin, Partner at Sequoia. "Ben and his
team bring a unique mix of tech, pharma, and AI expertise, along
with a track record in licensing high-quality drugs and executing
clinical trials. We are proud to partner with them as they push the
industry forward."
Formation Bio's team comes from across the tech and pharma
industries, reflecting broad conviction in the company's mission
and business model. Similarly, the company's investors represent
both pharma and tech profiles, as reflected in the two new leading
investors in this funding round: a16z and Sanofi. They are joined
by a selective group of investors who have been part of enduring
companies that have fundamentally transformed industries with
technology.
"Thanks to A.I, biotech and pharmaceutical
companies are about to be drowned in an avalanche of promising
looking drugs that merit enquiry," said Michael Moritz, Sr. Advisor to Sequoia Heritage.
"Formation Bio has the technology and know-how to help the industry
sort the wheat from the chaff."
By addressing the drug development bottleneck, Formation Bio can
enable the industry to advance more drugs than it currently can,
ultimately enabling more new medicines to reach patients.
"Formation Bio" and "TrialSpark" are trademarks of TrialSpark
Inc.
Press Contact
Lily Mintz //
press@formation.bio
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SOURCE Formation Bio