Linhao Zhang

Co-Founder & CTO

Our mission is to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently. We envision a future where drug development is faster, more cost-effective, and significantly more likely to succeed, ultimately allowing us to achieve that mission - and AI is a key part of that vision. By integrating AI into every aspect of drug development, we're pioneering a new model for pharma companies, one where AI is not just a tool, but a cornerstone of our operations and culture.

AI is rapidly becoming ubiquitous in our work and interactions, reshaping industries in paradigm-shifting ways. 

Pharma companies, with their foundations rooted in data, evidence generation, and decision-making, will operate vastly differently with the proliferation of AI than they do today. At Formation Bio, we're not just preparing for this future—we're actively creating it.

By integrating AI into every aspect of drug development, from drug acquisition to NDA submission, we're pioneering a new model for pharma companies, one where AI is not just a tool, but a cornerstone of our operations and culture. 

We're redefining how pharma companies operate, making drug development faster, more efficient, and ultimately more successful in bringing life-changing treatments to patients.

Our approach to AI innovation and investment spans short, medium, and long term horizons, and always keeps privacy and the best interests of patients in mind. 

First, we’re applying AI tools to optimize workflows and processes, tackling manual, repetitive, and time-intensive tasks that should be fully automated. In parallel, we’re building AI tools to support critical decision-making, providing insights and recommendations across vast sets of data to human decision-makers. Lastly, as the AI technological landscape continues to mature, we’re deploying autonomous agents to carry out both manual processes and make increasingly higher-order decisions.

To achieve this ambition, our people and culture will evolve in lockstep with our AI roadmap and capabilities. Our ceiling as an AI-native pharma company will only be as high as the willingness and ability of our teams to adopt an AI-driven culture. For us, this kind of culture means:

We invest in data acquisition and insights generation, augmenting human decision-makers with the best available information at every juncture.

Data is acquired and analyzed early and often (e.g. during asset diligence) to give us maximum conviction (first we manage this data manually with data science and over time, autonomously with AI)

Distance and time between teams and their required datasets (e.g. program teams and clinical data). Over time, all data we acquire and/or produce will be made available internally, easily accessible to the right stakeholder on their own or with minimal support

We are willing to make financial and strategic investments to acquire the right datasets to help improve our decision-making

We capture the inputs and outputs of all decisions as a company. Like a neural network, our company "trains" itself, improving from program to program, decision to decision, process to process. Our learnings persist over time, enabling us to constantly iterate on how we operate and provide digital context to AI agents we will build and train.

Program inputs and outputs are well structured, centralized, and modeled (e.g. facts about a program like disease info, competitor drugs, etc.) and kept up-to-date within programs and beyond (e.g. TA-specific facts)

Decisions and their outcomes are logged and captured in standard formats across the entire company, in detail. This is especially important for cross-functional teams driving critical business initiatives.

All past data and learnings are leveraged in future work, ideally via automation if possible (e.g. re-using prior study builds and templates)

We grow teams with AI automation and technology, rather than growing headcount. Teams are trained in the latest technology to enable increasing leverage and output without increasing their size. 

Every individual is empowered to discover, learn, and implement tools to become more efficient in their day to day work, operating with curiosity and an early-adopter mindset.

Team members share knowledge and hold each other accountable to leveraging AI by proactively giving and seeking feedback on their performance with it.

When considering team expansion, leaders first interrogate scaling factors and consider how AI can drive efficiency, prior to seeking headcount for a new role.

We envision a future where drug development is faster, more cost-effective, and significantly more likely to succeed, ultimately allowing us to bring more life-changing treatments to patients. By leading this charge, we aim to usher in a new era of efficient, AI-driven drug development that fully unlocks the potential of new medicines, overcoming the bottlenecks that exist today.

We envision a future where drug development is faster, more cost-effective, and significantly more likely to succeed, ultimately allowing us to achieve that mission - and AI is a key part of that vision.

Articles by Linhao Zhang

Formation Bio's AI Vision Statement