Lots of yummy quotables at Human[X] this week, Part II

Biotech unicorn Formation Bio's CEO Benjamine Liu had my favorite quote of the hashtag#Humanx week, not because it is provocative but because it aligns with a deep conviction of mine: that the value of AI/genAI can only be harvested by those who can evaluate and curate the output.

1️⃣ Ben said that from his perspective, great talent is "people with the ability to know what great is". These people have the ability to guide the discovery and development journey. Montai Therapeutics's CEO Margo Georgiadis added another important piece: you need people from different disciplines, who know what great looks like from their discipline's perspective, to work together.

Plus, a great, intimate Q&A session with Ben and Formation.bio's CTO Linhao Zhang followed, describing the company's unique business model. I may have monopolized the questions 😵‍💫 . Here are a couple of takeaways:

2️⃣ "Drug discovery is becoming more efficient while drug development is getting more expensive. As a result many good [discovered] drugs do not get developed." That's basically the gap that Formation Bio's business model addresses: find and acquire good discovered drugs with a human safety profile (phase 1) and develop them fast and cost-effectively.

3️⃣ Formation Bio has basically three sources of assets: (1) biotechs that fail, (2) big pharma assets that are shelved for strategic reasons, (3) AI discovery companies that don't have the resources to develop all the assets they discover.