Max Baumann Authors InVivo (Citeline) Feature
InVivo, Citeline’s strategic industry insights publication, has published a bylined feature by Max Baumann, Partner at Treehill Partners. InVivo is among the industry’s most credible outlets for long-form strategic analysis, read by senior leaders across biopharma, and the placement gives Treehill’s clinical development optimization thesis a substantial platform.
The article confronts a question the sector has largely avoided: why the biopharma investment drought of the past five years has proved so persistent. Baumann’s argument is that investors have not simply lost their appetite for risk – they have lost patience with an operating model that destroys capital through preventable failure.
He sets out an uncomfortable diagnosis: approximately 80% of late-stage clinical failures are not failures of the underlying science, but of study design, endpoint selection, competitive positioning or commercial strategy. When a Phase III program collapses because it was designed against endpoints that were never commercially relevant, or because the competitive landscape shifted during a timeline nobody thought to reassess, the consequences cascade – workforce reductions, retreating investors, and patients left waiting for a well-designed program that never came.
On the current enthusiasm for artificial intelligence, Baumann is deliberately sceptical. AI, he argues, is being treated as a silver bullet for problems that are fundamentally organisational rather than technological. A program designed against the wrong comparator, on a timeline that ignores the market it will eventually enter, will only fail more efficiently with better tools. The redesign the sector needs is deeper: commercial strategy cannot be bolted on at Phase III, but must shape a program from target selection onward. The question is not merely whether a molecule works, but whether the evidence generated will be sufficient, relevant and timely enough to support a commercially viable product in the market that will exist on arrival.
The piece extends the argument to advanced therapies, where Baumann observes the same operational mistakes being repeated across the cell and gene therapy landscape – programs built without adequate manufacturing strategy, trials structured without a clear path to reimbursement, and timelines resting on regulatory assumptions that were already shifting. He contrasts this with the model emerging in China and South-East Asia, where capital-efficient, commercially disciplined companies are achieving early clinical proof of concept at a fraction of Western costs, and argues that the investors returning to biopharma are gravitating toward exactly this discipline, regardless of geography.
Baumann closes by invoking James Lind’s 1747 scurvy trial – a clear question, a practical outcome, and the minimum resources necessary to reach a definitive answer – as the standard the modern sector has lost sight of, and should hold itself to once more.
Read the full article on: https://insights.citeline.com/in-vivo/innovation/the-drug-development-sector-is-failing-patients-and-it-is-time-we-asked-why-PF4GACS3UJF7JPPSZZV2ZVPRC4/
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