Mission and Purpose at Formation Bio

Despite the sweeping technological changes transforming biotech — and society at large — the process of bringing a new drug to market still lasts longer than 10 years, and costs billions of dollars. What’s more, the time and costs are actually increasing, contributing to rising drug prices, inflated healthcare costs, and, ultimately, decreased access to treatments for patients.

Drug development has become slower and more expensive over time, despite dramatic improvements in technology. In fact, the number of new drugs approved per one billion R&D dollars spent has halved just about every nine years since 1950.

Formation Bio’s mission is to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.

To achieve that goal, we must target the biggest bottleneck in drug development. Before we talk about what that bottleneck is, let’s briefly talk about what it isn’t.

Finding new drug candidates isn’t the problem

This was a fact I didn’t fully appreciate as a graduate student in computational biology. I initially believed that the availability of new treatments was limited because there simply weren’t enough drug candidates being researched and discovered. When I began my studies, I was excited about the potential for sequencing, big data, and artificial intelligence to revolutionize the pace of drug discovery.

What I came to recognize is that the industry is not lacking in promising drug candidates — it has plenty of them sitting idly at the top of the drug development funnel. In fact, if we were to stop research today, there are as many as 10 drug candidates for every one drug that makes it to trial. As technological advancements make drug discovery more efficient, this pile-up of possible new drugs is only going to get worse.

In order to bring treatments to patients faster, the most important bottleneck to fix is actually the one caused by the high costs and long durations of clinical development - the period spanning multiple phases of clinical trials that is required for every drug. Only a small handful of promising drugs candidates are currently making it through the development process. That must change in order to increase the total number of treatments available to patients.

We’re fixing the clinical development bottleneck

Formation Bio is decreasing the time and increasing the efficiency of clinical development, allowing a greater number of new treatments to be trialed each year. The more shots on goal we can take, the more treatments we can expect to deliver to patients.

Our platform marries ever-iterating tech innovation with ruthless operational efficiency at all parts of the drug development lifecycle. The first step towards this is recognizing that clinical development is a complex logistics problem, requiring a delicate orchestration of procedures, people, and parts defined by rigorous research protocols

We believe that a technology-first approach — fusing software and data across a single operational layer — can significantly decrease dvelopment timelines and improve data quality overall. This is the heart of our solution. By adding automation, AI integrations, and operational efficiency, we’re able to simplify the logistics and create a faster, more cost-effective trial process.

Technology isn’t the only solution, however. We understand that, at its core, drug development is a deeply human process. No drug is brought to market without a team of doctors, patient volunteers, and researchers working together toward a shared goal.

Building a mission-first company

Our mission defines our roadmap and clarifies our purpose. We strive to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently because each and every one of us has family members or friends whose lives are affected by disease.

This is why we are driving so tirelessly towards our mission. Our team knows that time is of the essence — not just because a drug loses up to $5M in net present value each day it remains unavailable — but because a single day can make all the difference to a patient waiting for a life-saving treatment.

A mission as ambitious as ours can only be realized by a strong team of people, empowered to contribute their unique insights and ideas to help solve the problems we will face. We believe our success will be most influenced by the people we can attract to our cause and the values that we promote across our organization and with our partners. Our teams are formed by diverse, exceptional talent from across a myriad industries, merging tech with traditional pharma and beyond.

We believe the companies that stand the test are ones that put mission and purpose ahead of ego. They interrogate decisions based on first principles and understand that an ambitious, uncompromising roadmap can only be achieved through a sequence of deliberate and well-executed steps.

These companies understand that the accomplishments of yesteryear have little bearing on future success. They know that they’re only as great as their next hire, their next day, their next quarter, and their next year. This is the template to which our team aspires.

Let’s build the pharma company of the future

At the end of the day, we will judge our success by the impact we have on the lives of patients and how many new treatments we ultimately contribute to the world.

We are still in the early stages, but we’re so excited for what’s in store. If our values and mission speak to you, we welcome you to join us on this journey. Together, we can build the pharma company of the future.

This article was originally published in November 2018, and was updated in December 2023 to reflect the company rebrand from TrialSpark to Formation Bio.