Training Bio is a startup that focuses on the implementation of Artificial Intelligence in the creation of medicines, with the support of the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman. The company has secured more than $250 million to support its ambitious product development plan.
The Training company announcing on Wednesday that it has raised $372 million in a Series D funding round. This round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and included participation from drug maker Sanofi, as well as Sequoia, Thrive, Emerson Collective, Lachy Groom, SV Angel Growth and FPV Ventures. With this new investment, Formation has raised more than $600 million in total, according to PitchBook data. The company has indicated that these funds will primarily go toward partnership acquisition and research and development initiatives.
The company declined to disclose its new valuation. However, a representative reported that it is a significant milestone toward the billion-dollar valuation of the Serie C Company.
The company, which was previously called TrialSpark, was founded by Benjamine Liu and Linhao Zhang in 2016. Liu has a background in computational biology and has conducted neuroscience research at Oxford and UPenn universities. For his part, Zhang is a software development professional and previously worked at Salesforce before joining Oscar Insurance as a product engineer.
Formation develops high-level technological solutions for conducting clinical trials and drug research and development. The company licenses intellectual property of drugs and collaborates in their development in association with companies in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical sector, carrying out the expansion of these drugs beyond the initial clinical testing phase.
The drug development process is known to be expensive and complicated. In general, are required between 10 and 15 years to take a drug from initial discovery to regulatory approval, with a cost per drug that can go up to the 5.500 billion dollars. Besides, it is estimated that 90% of medicines fail to reach the market.
Formation maintains that it can conduct clinical trials more efficiently by improving processes such as study initiation, participant selection, and information management. For example, the company is currently using artificial intelligence to create patient recruitment materials and adverse event reports. Likewise, it is perfecting artificial intelligence models to provide recommendations to drug research and development teams in their decisions and to more accurately predict the toxicity, tolerance and efficacy of drugs.
Last month, the company Training announced a partnership with OpenAI and Sanofi in order to jointly create and develop personalized Artificial Intelligence solutions for drug research. OpenAI stated its commitment to providing access to its capabilities and knowledge in Artificial Intelligence, while Sanofi committed to providing proprietary data for the creation of Artificial Intelligence models.
OpenAI's involvement appears to raise a potential conflict of interest, as Altman was involved in Formation's Series C fundraising. According to information provided by OpenAI PR, the agreement was overseen by OpenAI's COO, Brad Lightcap, and the organization's board of directors, however, it was not specified whether Altman, who is part of the board of directors, abstained from participate in the decision.
“En Sanofi, todos participamos en la Inteligencia Artificial”, expresó el director ejecutivo de Sanofi, Paul Hudson, en un comunicado oficial. “Estamos satisfechos de colaborar e invertir en Formation Bio, cuya visión y habilidades en el desarrollo de medicamentos impulsado por la Inteligencia Artificial contribuirán a avanzar en nuestra industria hacia el objetivo compartido de acelerar y mejorar la manera en que llevamos más medicamentos nuevos a los pacientes”.
Formation has three drugs in development in its clinical pipeline, including treatments for chronic hand eczema, sensory neuropathy and knee osteoarthritis. The most advanced is the treatment for eczema, which has recently reached phase 3, which is the final stage of testing before a drug is submitted to regulatory authorities.
Various startups are seeking to lead in the field of AI-driven technology for drug research and development. One of them is EvolutionaryScale, which has recently received investments from Amazon and Nvidia. According to the analysis company Markets and Markets, it is estimated that the market for artificial intelligence applied to drug discovery will reach a value of 4.900 billion dollars in 2028. Among the main participants in this space are Xaira (with an initial investment of 1.000 billion dollars), Isomorphic (a spin-off of DeepMind ), Insilico, Profluent endorsed by Jeff Dean, Enveda and Causaly.
