Faro Health: Accelerating Drug Development with AI in Clinical Trials

Blog
Written By Greg Toroosian

New medications often face a long, costly journey before reaching patients, a critical challenge that impedes timely access to life-saving treatments. However, a significant transformation is underway, with companies like Faro Health increasingly leveraging artificial intelligence to redesign and accelerate clinical trials fundamentally. This innovation promises to shorten development timelines and reduce costs, ultimately benefiting patients worldwide.

On Episode 91 of the Machine Minds Show, hosted by Greg Toroosian, founder of Samson Rose, we welcomed Patrick Leung, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Faro Health. This pioneering Silicon Valley company stands at the forefront of this transformation, utilizing AI to address critical inefficiencies in clinical trial design and accelerate the path to new drugs reaching the market. Our conversation with Patrick delved into the profound impact of AI on healthcare and Patrick's journey from a diverse career in tech to a mission-driven role at Faro Health.

Patrick Leung: A Career Arc Towards Mission-Driven Innovation

Patrick Leung’s professional trajectory is marked by significant roles at some of the world's most influential technology and finance companies. His career began in the dynamic dot-com era, where he witnessed the full lifecycle of a startup. He then spent eleven years at Google, gaining extensive experience across diverse groups, including Emerging Markets and Google Maps. His final role at Google involved working on Google Duplex, a conversational AI project renowned for its ability to conduct lifelike conversations on a user's behalf.

Following Google, Patrick moved to Two Sigma Investments, one of the world’s largest algorithmic hedge funds, where he applied data science and AI to private investing. This experience provided him with deep insights into the global economy. His journey then led him to establish his own company, a mission-driven venture focused on leveraging AI for carbon financing in nature restoration. This experience solidified his commitment to pursuing only "completely mission-driven initiatives" in his career.

Patrick’s personal connection to the medical field, through his father, who is a heart surgeon, fostered a long-standing curiosity about healthcare. This curiosity, combined with a friend's insight that "life sciences is the place where AI can really take hold and have an impact," drew him to Faro Health in late 2023. At Faro Health, he found a profound alignment with his personal mission: "bringing cutting-edge new medicines to people faster and cheaper."

The Challenge: Confronting Eroom's Law in Clinical Trials

The traditional landscape of clinical trial design is fraught with immense challenges. As Patrick explained, these trials are incredibly complex, spanning many years, involving hundreds of people and multiple sites, and requiring intricate medical procedures. Astoundingly, much of this colossal undertaking has historically been managed and documented using Word documents, lacking the structured precision essential for such critical endeavors.

This archaic approach contributes significantly to a phenomenon Patrick highlighted: Eroom’s Law. This inverse of Moore’s Law states that drug development costs and time are doubling every nine years, a trend that has persisted for the last five decades. Several factors exacerbate this "trial inflation":

  • Trial Bloat: A tendency to "copy and paste" previous trial designs and continuously add more measurements without sufficient analytics or visibility into the escalating costs and complexities.

  • Lack of Diversity: Historically, many trials relied on homogeneous participant groups (for example, white males) for recruitment ease. However, Patrick stressed a critical physiological reality: individuals from different racial backgrounds and genders can react drastically differently to the same medication, even with similar height and weight. The necessary inclusion of diverse trial populations adds complexity to recruitment and design.

  • Cost of Early Mistakes: Mistakes made at the design stage of a clinical trial are the most expensive. Unnecessary activities, failure to consider patient burden, or issues with patient enrollment can lead to costly FDA amendments, significant delays (months or even years), and tens of millions of dollars in expenses.

Faro Health's AI-Powered Solution: Automating Precision and Accelerating Discovery

Faro Health, symbolized by its name "Faro" (Spanish for "Lighthouse"), aims to illuminate and streamline this complex process. The company developed a purpose-built SaaS system that models trials, provides comprehensive analytics, and offers critical visibility into patient experience, site costs, and operational complexities. Patrick’s arrival at Faro Health specifically accelerated the adoption of AI to enhance this system further.

Faro Health’s AI-driven platform addresses the "Green Field" opportunity in life sciences by tackling the limitations of traditional methods. Recognizing that large language models (LLMs) like GPT and Gemini, while powerful for generating prose, cannot produce clinical-grade documentation requiring precise, factual content due to issues like hallucination and omission, Faro Health devised a robust solution:

  • Automated Research: Faro Health is developing technology that pulls tens of thousands of publicly available clinical trials, using generative AI to extract relevant design information, including images, tables, and raw text, and build a rich Knowledge Graph and data repository for each trial.

  • Intelligent Querying: Clinical scientists can query Faro Health’s AI system (for example, "Show me oncology trials with lower patient burden") to rapidly retrieve relevant examples and insights in seconds. This eliminates laborious manual research through countless PDFs, enabling rapid convergence on optimal trial designs.

  • Iterative Design and Validation: Faro Health's system uses a sophisticated, structured repository as input. The AI generates initial protocol sections, which are then rigorously evaluated against a checklist to ensure accuracy, completeness, and adherence to standards. If tests fail, for example, missing contact information, the prompts are refined, and the process iterates.

  • Dramatic Time Savings: While traditional clinical documentation can take weeks to months to write, Faro Health’s system can generate an initial version in a matter of an hour. This drastically accelerates the process, reduces manual errors, and makes changes much easier to propagate across documents. Patrick emphasized that this AI integration does not eliminate jobs but accelerates and enhances human capabilities.

Real-World Impact and Future Vision

Faro Health’s impact is already tangible. Patrick highlighted a partnership with Merck, detailed in a co-authored paper, which quantitatively demonstrates significant time and cost savings. Because design changes upstream have a compounding effect over the multi-year lifecycle of a trial, the financial benefits can be tens of millions of dollars or more, making Faro Health’s solution a "no-brainer" for drug developers. Beyond cost, the time savings translate directly to quicker impact for patients in need, as every day a trial is delayed costs millions in potential lost drug sales. Faro Health also boasts a partnership with Recursion, a mid-cap pharma company that leverages AI for drug selection, demonstrating Faro Health’s appeal to other AI-forward organizations.

Looking ahead five to ten years, Patrick envisions a profound transformation in healthcare driven by AI:

  • Pervasive AI: As AI inference costs rapidly decrease, AI features will become pervasive and virtually free, eliminating current cost obstacles.

  • Smarter Systems: Faro Health and similar groups will continue to leverage structured data and ingest new research, leading to significantly more informed, faster, and cost-effective AI systems.

  • Generative Designs: The AI could proactively generate hundreds of trial design variants, presenting optimal solutions to users and enabling the creation of designs currently unthinkable due to the sheer research and trial-and-error required.

Leadership Insights and Advice for Innovators

As a CTO building high-performing teams, Patrick prioritizes a blend of:

  • Technical Depth: Seeking individuals with strong theoretical knowledge, evidenced by PhDs or published papers.

  • Practical Experience: Emphasizing real industry experience in launching AI features, particularly with large language models, due to the nuances of creating useful, safe, and cost-effective products.

  • Core Qualities: Valuing curiosity, a "can-do" attitude, and an understanding of what it takes to launch enterprise products.

  • Culture and Mission: Recognizing that a compelling mission, working with smart colleagues, and a culture that values well-being and growth are crucial for attracting top talent.

Patrick noted the distinct mindset required for startups versus large companies. Startups necessitate a more generalist, "owner" mentality, where individuals readily take on diverse roles from sales to conference speaking because they are deeply invested in the product's success.

For aspiring leaders and entrepreneurs looking to innovate in health tech or medtech, Patrick offers direct advice:

  • Learn from Experts: This industry is highly specific. Engage with experts, understand datasets, problems, roles, and processes.

  • Network Actively: Leverage your network to find knowledgeable individuals.

  • Consume Industry Content: Listen to podcasts like the Machine Minds Show to gain insights.

  • Understand Nuances: Be aware of the particular processes, regulatory environment, and the profound human element involved, as this field is "a lot more real" due to its direct impact on lives.

The Future of AI in Clinical Trials: A Vision Brought to Life by Faro Health

The conversation with Patrick Leung on the Machine Minds Show vividly illustrates how cutting-edge AI is transforming the historically slow and costly process of clinical trial design. Faro Health is not merely optimizing; it is fundamentally reshaping how new medicines are brought to the world, promising a future of faster, more efficient, and ultimately more accessible treatments for patients globally.

Samson Rose remains dedicated to connecting visionary organizations like Faro Health with the exceptional talent needed to drive such groundbreaking innovations in robotics, AI, and hard tech.

Key Points to Remember

  • Eroom's Law Countered: Traditional drug development is slow and costly, but AI offers a path to significantly accelerate clinical trial design and reduce expenses.

  • AI for Precision and Efficiency: Faro Health’s platform uses AI to automate research, generate designs, and validate protocols, drastically cutting down trial planning time from months to hours.

  • Human-AI Collaboration: AI acts as a powerful accelerator and error-reducer, enhancing rather than replacing human expertise in critical trial design.

  • Tangible Impact: Faro Health's work has already demonstrated "tens of millions of dollars plus" in savings for major pharmaceutical companies, directly translating to quicker patient access to life-saving treatments.

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Greg Toroosian
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