How Formation Bio accelerated its drug-discovery pipeline using Elicit

In conversation with

Sandeep Basnet, MD
Senior Director of Clinical Development

Challenge

Extracting complex clinical definitions from 2,500 papers would require hundreds of expert hours and delay treatments reaching patients.

Solution

Integrated Elicit into their drug development platform for researcher-level accuracy on technically complex variables.

Results

Formation Bio used Elicit to extract over 40 technical statistical variables from 300 papers 5 times faster than typical processes.

About

Formation Bio is a New York-based AI-native pharmaceutical company combining sophisticated drug development strategy with AI technology to power hyper-efficient drug development. The company is backed by funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital, Sanofi, and others, with plans to expand its pipeline from 4 drug assets now to 10-15 drug assets over the next few years.

Formation Bio uses Elicit to accelerate complex data extraction from scientific papers by hundreds of hours, enabling its AI platform to support faster, more informed decisions in areas from trial design to asset evaluation.

Before Elicit

The company began using Elicit at-scale in 2024. While developing a clinical asset targeting knee osteoarthritis, they learned they needed to assess how end-stage knee osteoarthritis had been defined in clinical trials and previous literature so far – a daunting task using standard manual review methods.

“The traditional approach would be manually combing through about 2,500 scientific papers – that’s hundreds of hours of expert labor.