The Medicine Maker, a trade publication covering drug development,
formulation and manufacturing, has published a feature bringing together ten
industry leaders on the question of what is genuinely holding drug development
back. The contributions were drawn from responses submitted as part of the
publication’s annual Power List.
Ali Pashazadeh, Founder, Chairman and CEO of Treehill Partners, was among those
featured. Where much of the industry conversation on this question focuses on
regulatory burden, capital scarcity or trial complexity, his contribution located
the constraint somewhere closer to home: the decision-making layer itself.
Pashazadeh argued that the complexity of bringing a drug to market has increased
enormously, and that competitive pressure – particularly from South-East Asia –
has intensified exponentially, yet too many boards and C-suites continue to
operate on assumptions that were sound five to ten years ago and are no longer
sound today. Central to that gap is a misplaced confidence in outsourcing
strategic judgment. As he put it, a CRO will execute the study it is given; it
will not tell a sponsor that it is the wrong study.
The consequence is financial rather than merely operational. Competition for
capital is fiercer than at any point in recent memory, and the investors
deploying that capital are now able to benchmark a Western programme directly
against a Chinese competitor that reached proof of concept for a fraction of the
cost and in a fraction of the time. On Pashazadeh’s assessment, boards that have
not internalised this shift represent the single biggest obstacle to their own
companies securing funding.
Read the full article on: https://themedicinemaker.com/issues/2026/articles/august/the-10-biggest-bottlenecks-slowing-drug-development/
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