Pharma R&D Director

Persona 02 / 04

— A scene from discovery review

The pharma R&D director deciding whether to commit a portfolio slot.

Sits between bench scientists and a portfolio committee. Her bench team is enthusiastic about a target. She has to decide, in the next few weeks, whether to move it into formal pre-clinical investment — knowing that the reasons targets fail are usually visible in the literature long before the failure shows up in the clinic.

“

Is this target worth pursuing? What's already failed in this indication — and where are the unmet needs nobody's actually addressing?

— a question we hear from R&D leadership inside large and mid-cap pharma

What Brioche delivers

A diligence package that treats target validation as an evidentiary exercise. Every claim is sourced. Every failed program is named, dated, and cause-coded. Every unmet-need claim is grounded in a payer or guideline gap, not a marketing deck.

Target validity Genetic association strength, tissue expression, knockout phenotype, mechanism-of-action evidence — synthesized from OpenTargets, ChEMBL, UniProt, and primary literature, with confidence earned per claim.
Failure analysis Every prior program against the target or close analogues — terminated and ongoing. Cause of failure attributed to tox, efficacy, biomarker, or commercial. Sources cited.
Unmet need mapping Where the standard of care actually fails patients — drawn from guideline statements, payer coverage decisions, and registry data, not sponsor narratives.
Format A long-form written report. A working session with your team. The data layer behind it, available for your own reanalysis.

Illustrative scenario · not a real engagement Scenario sketch

A novel oncology target with strong genetic association — and a public failure record across multiple programs in adjacent indications.

The internal team is excited. The director's instinct says: this looks like a target that's been tried before. The diligence question is whether the prior failures are about the target, the chemistry, the patient selection, or the trial design — and whether any of those failure modes are addressable.

— Track 01

Failure record. Identify every program against this target class going back fifteen years. Read the trial registry entries against the publications, the conference posters, and the sponsor press releases to attribute failure mode.

— Track 02

Mechanism evidence. Cross-reference target biology against tissue-specific knockout data, human genetic association in UK Biobank and FinnGen, and downstream pathway perturbation from public CRISPR screens.

— Track 03

Unmet-need triangulation. Cross-walk NCCN guidelines, payer coverage policies, and patient registry outcomes to locate where the current standard of care empirically underperforms — not where the deck claims it does.

The pharma R&D director deciding whether to commit a portfolio slot.

What Brioche delivers

A novel oncology target with strong genetic association — and a public failure record across multiple programs in adjacent indications.

How other teams use Brioche.