01:37:15 · John Coogan, Zach Rash
[01:37:15] S1: Yeah. [01:37:16] S8: Right? Navigating Downtown LA is is is is unique and different than Chicago, which is very different than Finland, which is very different than parts of Asia. And so you have different kind of social norms and behaviors. And so the robot actually needs to learn how to be a great, you know, user of the shared space with the public. It has to be a great sidewalk user. But we also need to get from point a to point b very quickly. So we can't spend a lot of time stopping. So there's this really complex kind of social navigational problem that we have to get very good at. So I think we have, you know, we have millions of hours and millions of miles of driving in these sort of environments, you know, snows, sun, you know, weekend nightlife, all these different sorts of environments. So we probably have one of the largest datasets of this sort of data, and and that's used to train all of our models. But then we've actually open sourced and published some really interesting benchmarks, because I think as these models progress, I think some of these big labs might want to be testing, hey, how did their model actually do at navigating the the public realm? How do we actually do it navigating, you know, a Downtown Chicago sidewalk? Yeah. And we actually have some benchmarks we've created from these different environments that we've published, and I think that will be helpful to the robotics industry in general. [01:38:31] S1: Very cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordi, sorry. Do you have any
01:38:31 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Zach Rash
[01:38:31] S1: Very cool. Well, congratulations on the progress. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Jordi, sorry. Do you have any [01:38:35] S0: Yeah. Excited to see more of these around. It's it's an interesting thing. Like, you got it... You wanna... As a business, you wanna scale quickly. But I think, like, the the lesson from flock is that, like, individual consumers have so much power Sure. Over over, like what's allowed Yeah. To operate in their area. And I think that, making sure that, you know, friendly robots are are never annoying is has to be like number one priority. And and that's such a hard problem versus what you were talking about with like on the roads. It's like we have established laws. When the light's green, go. Yeah. Oftentimes, if I'm behind John, I have to honk after the light goes green. It's not getting any greener, buddy. But anyways, very difficult problem. And, yeah, I wanna see the Coco robot in Japan. I promise not to touch the big red button. [01:39:24] S1: Yeah. I I can I can be trusted? I imagine you hiring a couple of these just to patrol the property. This feels like an intermediary. If you if you don't wanna go robot dog patrol and humanoids aren't working yet, just having a a fleet of Coco's circling the property at all times, that's security. I like it. [01:39:42] S8: Guys, how do we get some lunch orders going to the office, going to the studio? [01:39:45] S1: Well, we'll coordinate. Nick will text you right now. We'll figure it out. [01:39:48] S0: We'll Yeah. We'll do it.
01:39:48 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Zach Rash, S2, Ben Liu
[01:39:48] S0: We'll Yeah. We'll do it. [01:39:48] S1: We'll get our lunch delivered with Coco. Thank you so much. Yeah. Great to [01:39:51] S8: hang out. Thanks, guys. [01:39:52] S0: Congrats on the rest day. Of [01:39:53] S1: See you. We do have the phone toss replay live on TBPN ready. Let's see it in action. Jordi [01:40:01] S0: Can we get a little zoom in? Jordi [01:40:04] S1: Bone. Oh, that that... [01:40:06] S0: But I really wanna see Tyler's. [01:40:07] S1: Held up well. [01:40:08] S0: Because Tyler was [01:40:09] S1: Tyler comes in. [01:40:10] S0: Was bolder because he thought I was gonna catch him. Yeah. What's Let's zoom in. Let's zoom in. [01:40:15] S1: Okay. Got a little box. [01:40:16] S0: Let's see what's happening. [01:40:17] S1: Can we see this? [01:40:18] S0: Throws it. Oh, gets out of the way. [01:40:20] S2: Yeah. When Jordi moves back. [01:40:23] S1: You fell for that one, Tyler. You fell for it hook, line, and sinker. Our next guest is the cofounder and CEO of Formation Bio with Ben Liu, launching a huge drug development fund. Ben, welcome. [01:40:36] S8: What's happening? [01:40:37] S1: Let's get this going ready. How are doing? Please kick us off [01:40:40] S6: with Thanks for [01:40:40] S1: having us. Yourself and the organization.
01:40:40 · John Coogan, Ben Liu, Jordi Hays
[01:40:40] S1: having us. Yourself and the organization. [01:40:44] S6: Great. So Benjamin Liu, co founder of CF Formation Bio. We're an AI native company at at building the next generation pharma company with this kind of core thesis that drug discovery is getting more and more efficient, and the fundamental bottleneck of bringing new medicines to patients is the cost and time of drug development. [01:41:01] S1: What's your stance on monkeys? What's your stance on monkeys? You got There's a Joel Lonsdale. [01:41:05] S6: There's gonna be a big shortage. [01:41:06] S0: There is. [01:41:07] S6: They're important. You know? That national security, we gotta increase the number of monkeys we have. It's, you know, the the similarity between our disease systems to kind of humans is probably one of the best predictors. Yep. Right? So you can imagine, like, solving, like, rat Alzheimer's is very different than sucky... Solving monkey Alzheimer's. Yeah. So But, you know, the biggest the biggest bottleneck is drug development in humans. And so, you know, you have this impedance mismatch where drug discovery is only getting more efficient. There's been a doubling of number of discovered drug candidates in the past ten years, even before AI. The number of approved drugs has kept, like, kind of constant 50 a year. Markets are rational, so discovered drugs aren't worth much till post phase two. Sure. So the company, we actually don't do any discovery internally. We look to acquire drugs that are discovered. [01:41:52] S1: Okay.
01:41:52 · John Coogan, Ben Liu, Jordi Hays, Amiram Shachar, S2
[01:41:52] S1: Okay. [01:41:52] S6: And then we built all the technology, people, processes, AI systems to run clinical trials and drug development more efficiently, but also the best humans and AI systems that know what drugs to pick and what diseases to match them to. [01:42:04] S1: Yeah. [01:42:04] S6: And then we provide all the cap and capabilities to get the drugs from where they are. So it's usually two to four years away from a clinical trial, and we provide all the cap and capabilities to get it post clinical infection. Yeah. That's where we're bottlenecking. That's what doing. [01:42:17] S1: No. No. Totally. [01:42:18] S0: Yeah. What what are... What what were the pre... Like, talk about, like, costs around drug discovery pre AI and then where you think it'll go with new advancements and models and and, you know, Because continued it it feels like a $600,000,000 fund, I imagine you're gonna distribute it across, like, [01:42:36] S1: a bunch [01:42:37] S0: of entrepreneurs and teams that are focused on that discovery. Mhmm. But then each one of those individual drugs, if they're promising and they start going through trials, could still cost hundreds of millions of dollars to actually take [01:42:50] S9: Yeah. It all [01:42:51] S6: That's actually the fundamental bottleneck, right? So you have this like kind of drug abundance in discovery. But once you hit the clinic, you know, a clinical trial can cost a [01:43:01] S2: few $100,000,000.
01:43:01 · S2, Ben Liu, John Coogan
[01:43:01] S2: few $100,000,000. [01:43:02] S6: Like a phase two clinical trial can be, you know, 60,000,000 to 80,000,000, if not more. And so what's going to happen is if we don't develop more capabilities around the drug development period, that we're not going to be able to translate all these discoveries into new medicines. And as you alluded to, you're kind of looking at like all these great discovery companies and, and, you know, getting a drug from, you know, a discovered idea to a 90 is now costing just [01:43:28] S2: a few million dollars. [01:43:29] S6: And that's probably going go down over time, right? You know, with all this automation and, you know, the the the great work that, you know, folks like Anthropic and, you know, you got Isomorphic. Like, design is getting increasingly commoditized. But what is pretty rare is, like, the ability to prove that it works in a human, And and that capacity hasn't changed. [01:43:50] S1: So so historically, what was the origin of the capital for this particular phase? Because, obviously, a lot of drug discovery candidate selection might happen in the... In academia. And then once you're post phase two, phase three, you're probably working with a big biotech, maybe got acquired. But is this the sweet spot for companies that might go public, might be traded as sort of like risk on biotech public markets investors historically, and you're able to Okay. [01:44:21] S6: That's right. So either you have to go public or you're raised from a traditional, like, Trad Bio OVC. Right? Flagship Like,