A score gets the team interested. A number gets it to the table. And only if that number can be defended when the committee leans on it.
BD&L conviction is not a feeling. It is a position a team can hold under pressure, sourced at every step, and current as of the moment someone challenges it. Building that kind of conviction has always been the real job. What has changed is how long it needs to take.
Screen: from 33,575 drugs to five targets in a single run
The first job in any BD&L workflow is to decide whether an asset is worth the team's time, and against what bar. Traditional search returns a list to sort. That is the wrong output for a team with more inbound than it can evaluate.
A purpose-built screener runs the asset through the team's own criteria and comes back with a verdict and its reasoning. For a BD&L rubric covering clinical differentiation, portfolio fit, IP and exclusivity, regulatory path, commercial potential, deal terms, and competitive risk, every sub-score is linked to the evidence behind it. The number is auditable rather than asserted.
Pointed at the whole universe instead of one asset, the same engine took a team from 33,575 drugs to five acquirable CDH17 ADC targets in a single run. Screening that used to consume weeks becomes the opening move, not the bottleneck.
Value: the rNPV model that holds up under committee scrutiny
A sourced rNPV model is built from the bottom up, from epidemiology, probability of success by phase, pricing benchmarks, and the competitive set, with every input traced to its source. That last part matters more than it sounds.
A model where every assumption is sourced changes what happens when the steering committee pushes on the number. The analyst is not defending a judgment call under pressure. They are walking through a sourced chain of evidence. The valuation holds up because it was never just a number.
In a MASH indication like efruxifermin, an FGF21 analog, that means a peak-sales estimate above $1.5 billion in a market on track for $31.8 billion by 2033, set against the deals that actually priced the space. Because the comparables are sourced rather than guessed at, the case survives the room.
Monitor: the view that never goes stale
A view is only as good as its expiry date, and in fast-moving indications that date is short. A landscape built last week can already be wrong. The same workflow that produced the brief should keep watching after it is written, tracking the catalysts that move the asset and the competitive events that reset its value.
The stakes are not abstract. Across more than 13,000 trial readouts, a single result moved an early-stage biotech by about six percent on average, with a tail running from near-total loss to a five-fold gain. When a newly acquired asset failed its mid-stage trials in a major indication in 2024, approximately $40 billion in market value evaporated in a single day.
Continuous monitoring is not a feature. It is what separates a living intelligence capability from a folder that describes a market as it was three weeks ago.
What arrives at the end of this process
When screening, valuation, and monitoring operate as a connected workflow rather than three separate activities, the output changes. What arrives at the end is not a folder of results to assemble. It is the finished work, every claim traced to source and ready to send.
A two-page licensing-committee brief. An eighteen-page diligence package. A deal-comparables workbook with every input sourced. The output of a workflow that compressed two and a half analyst-days to roughly three hours.
You define the objective. Agents do the assembly. Your team owns the judgment.
Why the advantage compounds
Speed is the headline, but it is not the whole return. Once conviction stops being something a team assembles by hand and becomes something it can produce on demand, the gains compound in three ways.
The same team evaluates far more inbound, weighing the fiftieth opportunity as carefully as the fifth. The constraint was never the people's judgment; it was the hours judgment lost to gathering. Every deliverable arrives with its evidence attached, so when the steering committee challenges a valuation, the sourced trail is already there. And institutional memory, the watchlists, the saved evaluations, the accumulated methodology, does not leave when an analyst does.
|
The full methodology, including a worked case study on efruxifermin from screening through monitoring, is in Ferma's white paper. Every claim is traced to source. |
Frequently Asked Questions
