Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Nazli Azimi · Therna Biosciences · August 2026
At platform stage in RNA, the near term counterparty is usually a partner rather than a customer. So this maps the partnering side of that market rather than a sales pipeline: where the people who sign research collaborations and licenses sit, what they are called, and roughly how many of them exist. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Large pharma with cardiometabolic or immunology franchises
The smallest segment on this page and the one that matters most at platform stage. The companies that both run a franchise in these disease areas and habitually buy platform stage science are a short, named list, and every one of them keeps a standing team whose whole job is finding companies like yours.
Who signs: head of search and evaluation, VP of business development, external innovation lead, therapeutic area head, and the chief scientific officer on the ones that move fast.
30 to 45 companies
worldwide, of which roughly half run active external innovation teams in these areas
Mid cap and specialty biopharma
The second ring, and the one most often skipped. These companies license in rather than build platforms, they move faster than large pharma, and they are far less contested because most platform companies aim only at the top of the market.
Who signs: chief business officer, VP of corporate development, head of research, and the founder or CEO at the smaller end.
7,500 to 8,000
registered US drug firms in total; the research stage subset that licenses in is not separately published
Platform and delivery adjacency
Companies whose delivery, formulation or manufacturing technology needs programs to carry, and who partner sideways rather than upward. Stated plainly: this group is not a register, it is a pattern. It is identified company by company from published work.
Who signs: chief scientific officer, head of partnerships, and the VP who owns technology and platform strategy.
No public register
identified one at a time from published work; the difficulty is why the segment stays open
Strategic and corporate investors
The capital conversation and the partnering conversation are usually the same conversation held by two different people at the same company. Corporate venture arms sit inside the pharma companies in the first row, and they meet earlier and more often than the deal teams do.
Who signs: managing director or partner at a corporate venture arm, head of strategic investments, and the scout who covers your area.
40 to 70
active life science corporate venture arms globally, concentrated inside the same parents as row one
Academic centers and the ultra rare route
Single patient and ultra rare work reaches an entirely different building: treating physicians, hospital research offices, and the disease foundations that fund the science and organize the families. None of that traffic goes through a business development inbox.
Who signs: principal investigator, director of a rare disease program, hospital research office lead, and the scientific director at a disease foundation.
150 to 200
US academic medical centers with active translational programs, plus several hundred disease foundations that sit in no single register

Where the openings are

1
The whole partnering audience is a few hundred seats, not a market. Rows one and four are 30 to 45 companies and 40 to 70 venture arms, each carrying a handful of named seats, and the mid cap ring adds a selected subset rather than the whole 7,500 to 8,000 register. Counted that way, the people who can actually sign something number in the low hundreds worldwide. That inverts the usual outbound question. Volume is irrelevant. What matters is whether the list is complete, whether every seat has been reached this year, and whether anyone can tell you which ones went unanswered.
2
Those seats turn over, and every move reopens a door. A new search and evaluation lead rebuilds a watch list in their first quarter. The companies already on the old list stay on it, and the ones that were never on it still never arrive. Watching a few hundred named seats for that change is mechanical work. Waiting to be remembered at a partnering conference is not a channel.
3
The rare disease route is a second audience for the same science. Physicians and foundations respond to evidence and urgency rather than to deal structure, and they are reached through a completely different door than a business development team. Most platform companies work one of these two audiences and leave the other untouched, usually because nobody owns it.
4
Interest is published in this market, which is unusual. Trial records, grant awards and pipeline pages name who is working in a disease area and who is moving into one. That makes the trigger visible from outside, on a schedule, rather than inferred after the fact. It is the sort of watching a machine does well and a founder does not have the hours for.
Built from public registries, counts banded deliberately. Firm counts come from federal drug establishment registration, which counts registered firms rather than research stage companies. Partnering, venture and foundation figures are not enumerated in any single public source and are banded from published market data rather than counted.
ENQUIRER CONSULTING GROUP
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