The $109B Bottleneck No One Talks About
Why we need Health Intelligence
In January, I watched a biotech company lose $3 billion in market value overnight when its Phase 3 trial in depression failed. Not because the molecule didn’t work, but because the data couldn’t tell us what really happened. With its share price came down crashing the hopes of millions of patients who need a better treatment for depression.
Every year, pharma spends over $120 billion running 30,000+ clinical trials. But less than 8% of drugs succeed through clinical trials to make it to the doctor’s office or pharmacy. Each failure means lost time, burned capital, and another therapy that never reaches patients. The problem isn’t always the science; it’s often the data. Trial data remains fragmented and inconsistent, with insufficient granularity to support meaningful learning. (Source: WHO; Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 2025).
When I first saw those numbers, it hit me how much potential is being wasted, not because the molecules are bad, but because we’re flying blind even in the later critical stages of drug development.
That’s why we started Calibrate Bio. We’re building the first Trial Intelligence platform. We’re betting on AI designed not to discover drugs, but to increase the success rate of clinical trials. Even great molecules fail in clinical trials. Trial Intelligence is the layer necessary to get the next cancer treatments, or that long sought Alzheimer’s treatment, over the finish line and to the patients who need them.
My co-founder Fei and I have spent years in both AI, pharma, and social good. Between us, we’ve gained experience building AI that solves real-world problems and taking drugs from concept to clinic to market. I’ve lived the reality of running clinical programs and seeing how fragile those systems are in practice. Fei brings deep research experience at Tsinghua and Caltech, and technical expertise in pioneering systems that calibrate AI to real world needs.
Here’s the crazy part: improving trial success rates by just 1% could unlock over a billion dollars in value every year. (Source: WHO; Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, 2025).
That’s the future we’re calibrating toward.
What the world could look like
Today, pharma already pours over $120 billion a year into clinical trials, yet most investors stay on the sidelines, wary of the high failure rates. The risk is so great that even promising drugs often die before they get a chance to prove themselves. If we could increase the success rate of late stage clinical trials, that dynamic would flip. Over a trillion dollars in new capital will flow into the space, funding innovation and novel therapies that are currently too uncertain to touch.
That would mean more shots on goal: more cancer drugs reaching approval, more Alzheimer’s and autoimmune therapies crossing the finish line, more rare disease programs finally getting a real chance. But beyond the numbers, it would mean less human suffering, patients living longer, healthier lives, families spared from loss, and entire communities lifted by better access to care. Healthcare systems would learn faster. Progress would accelerate. Humanity would get a health upgrade.