Benjamine Liu

Co-Founder & CEO

We are excited to share that TrialSpark has renamed and rebranded to Formation Bio! While our name is changing, our founding mission is steadfast: to bring new treatments to patients faster and more efficiently.

Our early years - and the TrialSpark name - were focused on sparking innovation within clinical trials, building clinical trial technology tools for drug developers, including software and platforms for digital patient recruitment and site management. We subsequently advanced to operating as a CRO, running end-to-end trials for sponsors, leveraging our in-house platform. Then, building on those capabilities, 

we evolved to acquiring and developing our own drugs.

Our model and capabilities have grown to serve our bigger vision of building the pharma company of the future. Our drug development platform has matured across R&D and tech, and we have established - and continue to grow - our own pipeline of majority owned assets. Now, our brand reflects this identity.

Formation Bio is setting a new standard for the pace of drug development. We're a tech-driven pharma company, bringing together technical depth, pharma acumen, and an enterprising spirit to shave years off the time it takes to bring new treatments to patients safely.

Together, we are forming a drug development platform that optimizes all aspects of clinical drug development, enabling more efficient protocol and program design, faster clinical trial completion, and increased quality throughout.

At Formation Bio, everything we do is motivated by the knowledge that every day counts for patients waiting for new treatments. Time is of the essence. The world is waiting for radically more efficient drug development, and we are answering the call.

Effective December 5th, 2023 we will be doing business as Formation Bio. We invite you to explore our new website and get a feel for our new visual brand. The back-end transition will take some time, and you may continue to see TrialSpark in some instances. (Software, documentation, billing etc.) The full transition will take place gradually in 2024.


Learn more about Formation Bio’s model 

Our Model

Interested in learning more about our approach?

As we advance on our journey toward building the pharma company of the future, TrialSpark is now officially Formation Bio.

Introducing 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 

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. 

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 

 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

on this journey. Together, we can build the pharma company of the future.

Careers

There are several thousand known human diseases, yet we only have FDA-

approved treatments for about 500 of them

. Patients are desperately waiting for more. We are building the pharma company of the future designed to bring new treatments to patients faster than ever before. 

Articles by Benjamine Liu

Introducing Formation Bio

Mission and Purpose at Formation Bio