“Find me our next blockbuster.”

These five words echo through boardrooms across biopharma companies, usually followed by an uncomfortable silence. It’s the mandate every CEO gives to their leadership team – Chief Business Officer, Chief Scientific Officer, Chief Medical Officer – and it carries the weight of the company’s future. Unfortunately, this mandate tells the leadership team what to do but not how to do it. And finding the next blockbuster drug isn’t an easy undertaking.

The pressure cooker of pipeline planning

For biopharma companies with late-stage programs, success can paradoxically create its own pressure. Yes, you might have that promising drug heading toward approval, but then what? The past few years have been particularly challenging for biopharma. Limited capital has forced companies to make tough choices, often trimming their pipelines to conserve cash. This short-term thinking has led to what I call “hourglass pipelines” — lots of novel early-stage science (at the top of the hourglass), perhaps one commercial or late (e.g. Ph3) clinical trial program (at the bottom of the hourglass)… with a concerning void in the middle. Getting from the top of the hourglass to the bottom can take five to ten years, and many early-stage programs don’t make it. 

It’s an existential threat that keeps CEOs & boards up at night: are we destined to be a one-hit wonder?

The impossible task

CEOs naturally turn to their executive teams, especially Business Development teams, to in-license their next major successful drug. It sounds straightforward enough until you look at the actual expectations:

• Evaluate every drug in late-stage pre-clinical and early-stage clinical development thoroughly
• Classify each candidate’s fit with current therapeutic areas, pipeline strategy, organizational strengths, and risk profile
• Conduct deep diligence on the most promising candidates to identify only the lowest-risk opportunities
• Ensure selected programs are fundable
• Accomplish all this with a fraction of big pharma’s resources

This is a herculean task.

The issues BD teams struggle with

Two key issues emerge in delivering on expectations for business development: sourcing and diligence. To find the ‘right’ program, first, organizations must be aligned. This is difficult: what defines your ideal drug program? Which attributes are negotiable? What unique internal capabilities set us apart? Some databases (such as EvaluatePharma and Cortellis) are valuable to find prospective programs, however, teams have to verify and enrich the data to find the ones they want to pursue further.

So, what does that process look like? Let’s assume your team created a short list. Due diligence is the next big hurdle. Diligence is where theory meets reality. Teams must examine every nook and cranny of a program to find each detailed risk associated with it. On top of that, the most compelling programs are competitive and must be evaluated quickly. Further slowing the process, business development teams must enlist internal experts across many functions (including tox, clinical development, and regulatory, to name just a few) to properly evaluate each program. This creates a massive resource burden – you need each specialized skillset to participate in evaluation in order to truly understand the risks and potential of any in-licensed drug program.

The current approach

Today’s standard approach to business development is brute force: build a search and evaluation team to scour literature, attend conferences, and manage the due diligence process. The BD costs are staggering – often exceeding $1M annually in loaded costs – but the time investment is even more precious. Just the “onboarding” process (hiring a team, defining program profiles, and gathering data) can consume six months or more. Hiring consultants? That just externalizes the effort while misaligning incentives, because while the organization is aiming for rapid results at low costs, consultants are paid for time spent, and therefore in no hurry to deliver results. That approach also still requires internal resources to validate the consultants’ work. In addition, many C-suites also know that team biases can kill good programs, but whether this has occurred is very hard to discern.

How AI can help

At Vibe Bio, we’ve developed a fundamentally different approach to business development and the due diligence it requires. As early-stage investors ourselves, we undergo search and evaluation constantly. Due diligence is in our blood. Given our deal flow and breadth of diseases we see, we’ve built a proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) model called VibeOne to help us evaluate programs systematically.

VibeOne works as an AI analyst: we’ve taught it to think like a drug developer so it is able to identify programs, evaluate risks, and analyze strategic fits for in-licensing.

The platform technology operates on two critical levels:

1. Evaluating fit with your ideal product profile by doing cursory reviews of collections of programs automatically.
2. Conducting deep scientific analysis to assess the risks and development potential of individual candidates.

This dynamic range is our competitive advantage: unlike a simple large language model (LLM) or database of programs, we can ingest large quantities of unstructured data to parse the attributes of a set of drugs, make sophisticated scientific analyses, and assess developability of an individual candidate.

This BD approach delivers multiple advantages:

• Speed. In the time you would spend onboarding consultants or a search and evaluation group, VibeOne could assemble a shortlist of drug candidates, dramatically accelerating the time to find your next program.
• Efficiency. VibeOne can identify the right opportunities and analyze scientific risks, enabling your team to quickly eliminate bad programs and focus resources on critical areas of risk.
• Consistency. Each disease area, pipeline, or individual candidate is evaluated with the same reliable and rigorous framework, customized by the Vibe Bio team for the unique needs of your organization.
• Accuracy. VibeOne avoids common human biases: familiarity, recency, etc. and applies your customized framework rigorously to every program at scale.

The future of business development

The pressure to find “the next blockbuster” isn’t going away. But the tools and methods we use to evaluate opportunities are evolving. By combining human expertise with AI-powered analysis, we’re helping companies make faster, more informed business development decisions about their next strategic moves. Biopharma due diligence doesn’t have to be about brute force. It should be about the intelligent application of force – leveraging technology to illuminate the best path forward quickly to bring innovative treatments to the patients who need them.