BioSpace — the leading digital platform for life science news and careers — published an opinion piece by Ali Pashazadeh, Founder and CEO of Treehill Partners, in March 2026. Drawing on Treehill’s experience meeting with executives from more than 170 companies and hosting seven structured roundtable discussions at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference, the article sets out a frank assessment of what has changed in biotech and what companies must do differently to survive.
The End of Pre-Pandemic Assumptions
Ali argues that the world biotech knew before the pandemic is not coming back. The influx of capital in 2020–2021 created an illusion that the fundamentals of drug development had been suspended. The prolonged funding drought since 2022 has corrected that — but the correction is not merely cyclical. Capital has structurally reallocated toward sectors offering more predictable returns, and traditional venture models premised on a handful of outsized wins compensating for widespread failures are increasingly misaligned with how limited partners think today.
Commercial Viability as the Minimum Bar
The article’s central argument is that biotech must stop operating on the assumption that brilliant science alone justifies investment. Products with peak sales potential of $100–300 million can represent genuinely successful outcomes — but they require fundamentally different development economics than blockbuster programmes. Companies attracting capital today are those that can articulate not just what their molecule does, but why a specific development budget is commercially appropriate.
Treehill’s analysis of clinical trial efficiency suggests that approximately 85 percent of clinical studies could be designed better. The disconnect between clinical development decisions and commercial requirements — proceeding without commercially relevant target product profiles, ignoring new entrants that will change the standard of care, developing combination regimens that cannot scale beyond minor subpopulations — remains a fundamental challenge the industry has not adequately addressed.
The market will not fund hope. It will fund plans and the skills needed to implement them.
Read the full article on: https://www.biospace.com/business/opinion-biotechs-must-face-reality-to-succeed-in-todays-funding-environment
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