Why Industry Veterans Can Change the Path of a Drug Discovery Program

This article is Part 2 of the Drug Discovery Roadmap series, building on Part 1, which unpacked the scientific and adjacent fundamentals of turning promising science into a medicine. It is illustrated with tangible examples of researchers and industry veterans who participated in a pitch event at the Drug Discovery Forum ( Biobeacon) that took place at the ARCS confenrence in 2025.

This piece explores:

A. Why industry veterans see different risks from the bench
B. What investors, clinicians and pharma-minded advisors need to believe
C. How the right question can change the next experiment, indication, pitch or team

It part of series.

• Part 1:‍ ‍Drug discovery is not just great science, it is a Roadmap.

• Part 2: Why Industry Veterans Can Change the Path of a Drug Discovery Program, current article

• 2026 article 1: Coming after ARCS Drug Discovery Forum 2026

• 2026 article 2: Coming after ARCS Drug Discovery Forum 2026

• Success story: ⁠Dr Chris Burns and Momelotinib to see the full journey in action with the Australian success story of Dr Chris Burns and Momelotinib, from lab bench to FDA approval.

‍ ‍

Biotech series:

Featuring insights from Tim Boyle, CEO of ARCS Australia; Dr Mike Lamprecht, Investment Manager at Tenmile; Dr Daniel Beard, Senior Lecturer at the University of Newcastle and founder and CSO of Shear Flow; and Dr Wolfgang Jarolimek, Head of Drug Discovery at Syntara.

Written by Angelique Greco, who brings 15+ years of experience across drug development, from preclinical research to clinical development, with a focus on translating from pre-clinical to clinical development, clinical strategy and operations.

There is a particular kind of question that can change a drug discovery program.

It is usually not dramatic. No drum rolls. There is no cinematic moment where someone points at a slide and whispers, "My God, the market."

It is quieter than that.

Someone who has seen this path before asks,
"Who will pay for it?"
Or, "Why did the last ten programs in this indication fail?"
Or, "Can you make enough of it?"
Or, "What will clinicians need to believe before they put patients into a trial?"
Or, "Is this really your first indication?"

And suddenly the room shifts from science focused to development focused.

This is why engaging with industry veterans, investors, clinicians, pharma-minded advisors and people who have actually taken products through development matters. They do not just improve a pitch. They can change the next experiment, the first indication, the funding plan, the manufacturing strategy and the story a founder tells about why this product deserves to exist.

That is the part of commercialisation that is often misunderstood.

It is not just about "selling the science". It is about stress-testing the path.

People who have done it before see different risks

In Part 1 of this series, I unpacked some of the scientific and adjacent fundamentals of the drug discovery roadmap: target product profile, toxicity, pharmacokinetics, target engagement, IP, manufacturing and the false economy of weak preclinical shortcuts.

Part 2 is about the people who help you see the risks you are too close to notice.

Tim Boyle, CEO of ARCS Australia, described why bringing early researchers and experienced industry people into the same room matters:

"Engaging with those that have done it before, creating an environment where people can ask the questions and not feel that they're asking silly questions, and getting everything from the regulatory strategy, the clinical strategy, and starting with understanding how do I get paid for this technology?"

That final question can feel blunt in an academic setting.

How do I get paid for this technology?

But in drug development, it is a necessary one.

If nobody pays, prescribes, adopts, funds, reimburses, partners or acquires, the therapy may never reach the people it was designed to help.

The problem is not that researchers do not care about impact. Most care deeply.

The problem is that the road to impact is full of practical constraints that are rarely visible from the bench.

Industry veterans can see those constraints earlier because they have the scar tissue.

There is also a bigger structural question sitting underneath this.

Does the scientist founder become the CEO and build the commercialisation skill themselves, or does the company bring in a team already built for the commercialisation pathway, so the scientist founder can stay closer to the science?

Both paths can work.

But they are not the same path, and they do not carry the same cost, speed or risk.

I wrote more about this with Ben Wright in the medtech context, especially why strong technology still needs the right team, the right business model and the right value fit to survive the system. The same principle applies here.

The question is not whether the scientist is capable. Many are.

The question is whether learning the commercialisation job on the job is the smartest use of time, capital and attention for this specific asset.

For a deeper dive on the scientist-founder, CEO and venture studio question, read: Why great medtech fails, even when it works.

Investors do not need every detail first. They need the shape of the opportunity

One of the clearest practical lessons from Dr. Mike Lamprecht, investment manager at Tenmile, was that an investor pitch is not a thesis defence.

Painful, I know. Especially for scientists, who have been trained to bring every detail, every control, every caveat and every graph known to humankind.

But the first investor meeting has a different job.

Mike explained:

"Upfront, you really want to be selling the idea and you need to be able to do that in a concise way. The initial meeting that you have with investors is usually not that long. You don't have a lot of time, and you have a lot of different pieces to get through, so you don't actually want to go too deep into the science."

This does not mean the science does not matter.

It means the investor first needs to understand the opportunity.

What problem are you solving?
Why does it matter?
Why might your approach win?
Why is this the right time?
Why are you the right team?
What happens next if the data works?

The deeper science conversation comes later.

"Once you have our attention, we're going to have follow-up meetings and we love to go deeper into the science. That's actually my favourite conversation, with the scientists going deep and trying to figure out all of the technical detail. But it is a mistake to overload that in the initial conversation."

That distinction matters.

Scientists often worry that simplifying the story means dumbing it down. It does not. A good pitch does not hide the science. It sequences the science.

First, help people see why this matters.

Then show them why the data earns attention.

The first meeting is not where you prove everything.

It is where you earn the second meeting.

The market number is not the market

One of the classic biotech pitch mistakes is the giant market slide.

There are this many patients. The drug could cost this much. Therefore, behold, a billion-dollar opportunity.

Technically mathematical. Strategically suspicious.

Mike called this out directly:

"That always worries me when there's a slide that says, our market is $10 billion, or there's this many patients, and it's just that one number. You have to be realistic about the population that you're going after because the number of patients you can go after directly relates to what the market opportunity is."

A disease population is not a market.

A market is the realistic group of people who may be diagnosed, eligible, reachable, treated, reimbursed and likely to use the product within a specific clinical pathway.

That is a much smaller number.

It is also a much more useful one.

Mike continued:

"I'm much happier to see a well thought out 500 million opportunity than I am a 10 billion because now I know that you've done the work for me, that I can go double check. But if you just give me the big number, then I have to go and try to figure everything out."

This is where conservative thinking builds trust.

A founder may think the biggest number sounds most impressive. But to an investor, a thoughtful smaller number can be more credible than a glossy fantasy.

The real question is not, "How many people have the disease?"

It is, "Which patients can you realistically reach, help and get paid to treat?"

Less exciting on a slide. Much more useful in a boardroom.

A good drug can still have no market

The antibiotic example is one of the clearest ways to understand the difference between medical need and commercial reality.

Everyone agrees we need new antibiotics. Antimicrobial resistance is one of the great health threats of our time. So surely, a good novel antibiotic would be a strong commercial opportunity?

Not necessarily.

Mike explained:

"On the antibiotic side, there's just a lot of questions about if there'll be a real market for it. It's not necessarily about the drug itself, because you could have a very good antibiotic and not have a company."

That sentence should make every founder pause.

It certainly did irritate me. How dare we threaten the future of humanity with investor questions?! Who will come begging for good antibiotics when a simple dentist procedure could become fatal without antibiotics? Eh? You tell me.

But if we all agree as human, people in pharma and investors aren’t spending their own money. It is not philanthropy (Elon is you hear me, there could be good use to all this money) and they must answer pragmatic questions.

You can have a good product and still have a weak business case.

Mike gave the example of Achaogen and Plazomicin:

"There was a company called Achaogen that built a new drug called Plazomicin and it's a very effective antibiotic. That company was public, became a unicorn, and a few months after it became a unicorn, people realised that it was going to sit on the shelf because stewardship of antibiotics means they don't like to use the newer drugs upfront. It literally sat on the shelf, and that stock unfortunately went to zero."

The issue was not simply whether the antibiotic worked. It was how antibiotics are used.

Stewardship means newer antibiotics may be held back, preserved for serious resistant infections rather than used broadly.

Clinically, that makes sense. Commercially, it makes revenue difficult.

This is the kind of problem researchers may not see early if they are focused only on product performance.

The same applies beyond therapeutics.

Diagnostics can work beautifully and still not be bought. MedTech products can solve a real problem and still fail if workflow, reimbursement or adoption is not there. A therapy can be clinically exciting and commercially weak if the payer path does not make sense.

Need is not the same as market.

Unfair? Alas.

Relevant? Absolutely.

Differentiation means knowing why others failed

Dr Daniel Beard, senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle and founder and CSO of Shear Flow, gave a useful example of what high-value feedback sounds like.

Shear Flow is developing a nanoparticle technology designed to selectively boost blood flow to the brain during stroke, with the aim of saving brain tissue and improving stroke outcomes.

Stroke is a high-need area, but it is also famously difficult.

Daniel said the panel's biggest question was about differentiation:

"The biggest bit of advice that I got was around the indication that we're focusing on. We're focusing on treating ischaemic stroke, and the panelists' main concern was that stroke is a very tough nut to crack. It's got a littered history of failures, in particular neuroprotective drug development. The panelists' main and very good question upfront was, how are we different to what's gone before, and what differentiates us and gives us that competitive advantage?"

This is exactly the kind of question that changes the story.

Not, "Is your science interesting?"

But, "Why will this work where others have failed?"

That is a much sharper test.

Daniel realised that although he had tried to address this in his pitch, it had not landed clearly enough:

"The thing I learned most from that was, I thought I did that in my pitch at the first slide, setting the scene, but maybe it didn't come across as well as it could have. Moving forward, the key thing for me is getting that front and centre at the start of the pitch."

This is why industry feedback is so valuable.

Sometimes the gap is not that the founder has failed to think about an issue. It is that the pitch has not made the answer obvious enough.

And when the indication has a history of failure, the burden is higher. You need to address the elephant in the room early, preferably before it sits on your cap table.

The better story is not prettier. It is more precise.

Daniel's revised framing is a strong example of how better positioning is not about making the science sound shiny. It is about making the logic clearer.

He explained:

"Previous approaches in the stroke field have focused on drugs that slow down how fast the brain cells die. But the key thing for us, why we're different, is that stroke is a disease of lack of blood flow, and our approach is targeting the root cause of the problem, that not enough blood is getting to the brain during the stroke."

That is a stronger story because it connects the mechanism, the clinical problem and the differentiation.

Then he put it even more simply:

"We're not a drug that's trying to tinker with the neurons and slow down how fast they die. We're getting blood back to the brain where it's needed."

That line works because it is clear.

It tells the listener what the product is not, what it is, and why that difference matters.

This is the kind of clarity founders need before speaking to investors, pharma partners and clinicians. If the field has seen failure after failure, your job is not only to explain what you do. It is to explain why the old failure pattern may not apply to you.

That requires humility and confidence at the same time.

Annoying combination. Very useful.

Clinicians are part of the path, not a later audience

Before a therapy is approved, someone has to test it.

That someone is usually a clinician, with real patients, real safety concerns and a very low tolerance for vague hand-waving.

Investors know this. Pharma partners know this. Regulators know this. Founders need to know it early too.

Daniel described how panel feedback raised questions about reperfusion injury after stroke, and whether his therapy might affect it. This created another layer of thinking around what data different stakeholders might need.

He said:

"Whether that's a thing that an investor might want to see, or is it more on the scientific side, there's that fine line that I'm learning a lot about as to what a clinical stroke researcher might want to see as a safety profile."

That fine line matters.

Not every interesting scientific question is a must-have for the next funding step. Not every investor concern is the same as a clinician concern. Not every clinician concern needs to be solved before the next milestone, but some absolutely do.

The art is knowing which is which.

Daniel described how his team started separating the essential from the useful:

"We've broken down, these are our must-haves in terms of what we need to do to de-risk this to get it to the clinic, and these are some nice-to-haves in the background."

That is a very practical shift.

Industry feedback did not simply create more work. It helped sort the work.

Must-have. Nice-to-have. Later. Now. Investor-critical. Clinician-critical. Scientifically interesting but not on the critical path yet.

That distinction saves time, money and mental load.

And anyone who has worked in early-stage biotech knows mental load is not exactly in short supply.

Your first entry point may not be your final market

Another important theme was that the best first path may not always be the most obvious one.

Sometimes the founder's dream is human health, but the smarter first move may be an adjacent field, a different indication, veterinary use, agriculture, diagnostics or a lower-risk entry point that can generate proof, data, capital or confidence.

Mike put it simply:

"Any way you can de-risk, the better. As a startup you're always scrounging to find the dollars to move forward. There might be an avenue to go after something in agriculture that would allow them to do those studies, and you can always leverage those studies into something else."

That kind of advice can be hard to hear.

If you are driven by patient impact, being told to consider an adjacent first market can feel like a detour.

But a detour that gets the technology funded, tested and de-risked may be more useful than a straight road into a funding wall.

Daniel had heard similar thinking around alternate indications for Shear Flow. Stroke was still the goal, but there may be less risky ways to build early evidence.

He said:

"We're thinking about alternate ways of going for other indications that are a bit less risky, maybe just to get that first-in-human safety data, prove it out, and then move into ischaemic stroke."

That is not a lack of focus. It is strategic sequencing.

Dr. Wolfgang Jarolimek, Head of Drug Discovery at Syntara, made the broader point:

"You need to have backup plans because you never know whether your compound will succeed in the disease that you initially targeted. Many compounds are tested in different diseases. I think it's important to have focus for the research that is physically done, but at the same time, they need to be very open-minded and see other opportunities as well."

This is the tension founders have to hold.

Focus enough to make progress. Stay open enough to survive.

A single-minded indication strategy can look disciplined. It can also become brittle if the first path fails or proves too expensive, too slow or too commercially difficult.

The better question is not, "How do we chase every opportunity?"

It is, "What is the smartest first path to build proof and keep the larger opportunity alive?"

Your clinical strategy matters. Don’t miss the opportunity to speak with clinical design experts who have seen hundreds of protocols.

There is a whole clinical strategy around testing multiple indications, including good basket trial designs where you test for multiple indications to understand which will get you the best signal then expand or double down on the cohort that responded the best.

This is most common in oncology but can be applied outside of oncology.

But basket trials are more expensive and if not designed right, they can dilute your trial results.

Consulting with clinical trial experts is another very important step in stress testing your strategy.

The value of industry feedback is not comfort. It is compression.

With Industry feedback come a range of questions that are less exciting to researchers than the discovery part.

How will you manufacture it?
What happens when your patent clock runs out?
Who pays?
Why will clinicians use it?
Why did similar products fail?
Why this indication first?
What data would make this investible?
What data would make you stop?

That is not criticism.

That is the roadmap talking.

The value of speaking with people who have done it before is that they can compress years of painful learning into one useful question. They can see where the program is thin. They can recognise whether the story is unclear, the market is inflated, the indication is too risky, the manufacturing plan is immature or the wrong experiment is being prioritised.

They will not always be right. No single advisor should become the oracle. We are not building a biotech around one person's raised eyebrow.

But patterns matter.

If multiple experienced people keep circling the same risk, it is worth paying attention.

The path changes when the right people enter early

The strongest lesson from the Drug Discovery Forum was not that researchers need to become commercial robots.

Nobody wants that.

The lesson is that the path to impact is shaped by more than the quality of the science. It is shaped by who sees the product, who questions it, who pays for it, who tests it, who adopts it and who believes the risk is worth taking.

That means the right people need to enter earlier.

Not after the company has spent three years answering the wrong question beautifully.

Earlier.

Industry veterans can help researchers and founders see the path while there is still time to adjust it.

That is where the real value sits.

🔎 Actionable insight: build your veteran question map

Take your project, product idea or career pivot and draw four columns.

• Science risk: what could fail biologically?
• Development risk: what could fail in translation, manufacturing, regulation or clinical testing?
• Commercial risk: who pays, adopts, partners or acquires?
• People risk: whose input are you missing?

For each column, write one question you are avoiding and one person who could help you answer it.

Then speak to one of those people before your next major decision.

Not after the grant. Not after the pitch. Not after you have already spent the money.

Before.

Final reflection: the right person can change the route

Industry veterans do not give you certainty.

Nobody has that.

What they can offer is pattern recognition. They can help you see where other programs failed, where investors lose interest, where clinicians hesitate, where manufacturing becomes painful and where the market is less real than everyone hoped.

The point is to give good science a better chance of becoming useful.

If Part 1 of this series was about the roadmap, Part 2 is about finding the people who can help you read it.

And if you want to see what the full path can look like when a drug survives the many handoffs, pivots and hard decisions, read the success story of Dr Chris Burns and the development of Momelotinib, from lab bench to FDA approval:

Read the Chris Burns and Momelotinib success story

Because sometimes the right question does not slow you down.

It saves the medicine from taking the wrong road.