Case Study: Formation Bio
“Elicit can extract technically complex variables from an enormous volume of papers with researcher-level accuracy – that’s incredible.” – Sandeep Basnet, MD, Senior Director of Clinical Development, Formation Bio
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." said Sandeep Basnet, Senior Director of Clinical Development. “These intensive reviews are necessary, but slow down clinical research and ultimately delay the progression of new potential treatments to patients. These are the bottlenecks we’re working to solve at Formation.”
Choosing Elicit to amplify research capabilities
Formation Bio works hard to find AI solutions that meet the high standards of the pharmaceutical industry and enhance their AI platform. They were particularly impressed when they tried Elicit for this project. "Literature review is an essential foundation to our work and our platform," explained Benjamin Miles, Lead Product Manager. "We were thrilled to find in Elicit an intuitive solution that meets our rigorous standards."
"What sets Elicit apart is not just the quality of its analysis, but how easily we can export the extracted data in useful formats for further analysis within our other systems," said Miles. "This allows us to integrate the findings directly into our broader AI platform and workflows.”
He added: "It's incredibly valuable to see statements that only come from the scientific literature. The reference and citation capabilities provide the rigor and transparency we need, unlike more generalized options that typically just reference websites of varying quality."
“Elicit correctly modified its extractions based on subtle considerations like whether the paper was a primary trial paper, a meta-analysis, or another publication type,” said Miles. “This level of nuance is critical for our drug development work."
Today: Transforming literature reviews across multiple projects
Now, Formation Bio uses Elicit as part of their AI-native platform focused on accelerating drug development from asset acquisition to trial design and execution.
With the knee osteoarthritis project, "We ended up extracting from 1,600 papers. We reviewed the output, and it was accurate. We did in about 10 hours what previously would have taken closer to hundreds of hours. That’s an order of magnitude faster and more efficient." said Basnet.
Building on this success, Formation Bio undertook a second, more complex extraction task. "This was a very complex extraction of over 40 technical statistical variables from 300 papers – including from tables." Basnet said. “This type of extraction would typically take about 5 times longer per page than a simple extraction.”
“We reviewed all the papers and found it to be accurate,” said the Formation Bio team. “Elicit can extract technically complex variables from an enormous volume of papers with researcher-level accuracy – that’s incredible.”
Looking forward: Expanding AI literature review across the platform
Formation Bio is strategically integrating Elicit to enhance more of their drug development platform capabilities. For instance, Basnet said, "We draft many data-driven briefings throughout the R&D process for the FDA and other regulatory bodies. Elicit will enable our AI systems and teams to strengthen their research foundations for these critical documents.
“Elicit Reports are helpful for understanding disease areas and unmet needs during the due diligence process for new assets.” Miles said. “They uncover subtle things that typical market intelligence or epidemiology tools miss. Adding Reports to these traditional sources allows us to focus our expertise on interpreting and applying insights rather than just spending time gathering them."
By integrating Elicit's AI-powered literature review into its broader AI-native platform, Formation Bio continues to transform traditional drug development processes into ones that can be completed in a fraction of the time with smaller teams – executing on its vision of hyper-efficient drug development that could bring potentially life-changing treatments to patients faster than ever before.