Corporate development leadership for biotechs that aren’t ready to hire a CBO.
Twenty years of sourcing, structuring, and closing pharma partnerships, licensing deals, and M&A, available fractionally, by the transaction, or as diligence support for investors.
Who this is for
Most private biotechs reach the point where partnering, out-licensing, or a strategic financing becomes the company’s most important project, long before they can justify a full-time Chief Business Officer. The CEO ends up running the process alone, or the CFO does, or a banker who won’t return calls on a deal under $50 million.
I fill that gap. I have been the CBO at two venture-backed neuroscience companies and led BD and strategy at a third through its largest partnerships. I work with a small number of companies at a time, as a member of the leadership team rather than a vendor.
Four ways to work together
Fractional CBO
One to two days a week as your head of corporate development: partnering strategy, pharma outreach, deal negotiation, board and investor materials, and building the BD function you’ll eventually hire into.
Transaction advisory
A single engagement to run a specific process end to end: an out-licensing campaign, a platform collaboration, a co-development deal, or a sale. Retainer plus success fee.
Diligence for investors
Practitioner-level assessment of a program, platform, or company for funds and family offices, with particular depth in CNS, ophthalmology, and rare disease.
AI-enabled BD and competitive intelligence
I’ll set up the sourcing, landscaping, and monitoring workflow your BD function should have in 2026, built on public data and current AI tooling, and train your team to run it.
Proof
Biohaven collaboration
Negotiated, and later expanded, a strategic collaboration between Biohaven and a human-CNS platform company.
Alexion option agreement
Led the Alexion–Stealth agreement for an option to co-develop and commercialize a late-stage mitochondrial-disease therapy.
$50M in follow-on financing
Identified the development opportunities that positioned Stealth BioTherapeutics (now Mighty Therapeutics) for an additional $50M from existing investors, supporting expansion into orphan neurodegenerative disease and ophthalmology.
~20 R&D transactions at Pfizer
Research collaborations, licensing, co-development, and divestitures, from sourcing through alliance management.
How I work
Modeling is a means to an end. The number matters because the board, the partner, and the investor will act on it, so I build valuations and deal models quickly and defend them carefully, but the work is getting the transaction done. I use AI tooling throughout for landscaping, diligence, and first drafts, which is why a one-person practice can move at the speed of a five-person BD team. What AI doesn’t do is pick up the phone to the head of BD at the partner, or sit in the board meeting. That part is me.
Tell me what you’re trying to get done.
A thirty-minute call is enough to tell whether I can help and which structure fits. No deck required.
Or email brian@biotechmodel.com.