The practice

The information functions of a biotech, run for founders who won't hire a department.

You own the science and the decisions. I take one of the seats around you. My agents do the information work on BioAlma, the platform I built, in a workspace of your own. That is the whole offer. It is what the shape on the home page looks like when one person brings the seat, the agents and the platform together.

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Runs on

Who it is for

The chief executive of a small biotech, from two people to thirty, with a date on the calendar. A financing. A pivotal readout. A filing. A launch to prepare. A partner to find.

You need the functions a larger company would staff, and you would rather not hire a department to get them. You have seen the alternatives: a consultancy that leaves a deck, a vendor that leaves data, a hire that takes six months to find.

What I cover

I cover the information side of every function. The physical work stays with your partners. One seat covers several functions, because the agents do the volume.

Competitive and medical intelligence. Who is in your indication, at what phase, with what data. The market, the standard of care, the reimbursement models, and everything that informs medical affairs and the field. Kept current from registries, publications, filings, congress abstracts and payer sources, after the slide is made.
Business development and the CRM. The target list, the diligence pack, the partnering materials, the first conversations, and a CRM that stays current. You keep the negotiation and the trust.
Medical affairs. The KOL map, the publication and congress plan, the scientific narrative. As a physician, I hold this seat myself. You keep the relationships.
Regulatory precedent. What the agency asked the last sponsor with your mechanism, your endpoint or your population, before you hold the conversation with the agency.
Strategy, finance and the plan. The market map, structured customer interviews, the business plan, the financial model, the budget and the monthly variance, the board material. For fundraising: the investor list, the materials, the data room and the tracking. You raise the money.
Operations tracking. The analytical side of clinical operations: enrollment, sites, timelines and vendor performance, read from your CRO's reports. The planning side of the lab and of manufacturing: materials, lots, lead times and budgets, kept in a material requirements plan. Your CRO, your CDMO and your lab run the work.
Conferences. Abstract triage and the who-to-meet list before you fly. You keep the hallway.

What I do not cover: the physical work. The bench, the manufacturing line, the sites and the patients, and the quality system stay with your CDMO, your CRO and the fractional experts who hold those seats. I can help you choose them, and I track their work.

How it works

Four parts, always together.

A seat.

I sit in your handful as the strategy, business development or medical person, with the obligations of a seat: I am in the meetings, I know the context, and I sign what I send you.

Agents.

My agents, built on BioAlma, do the information work. Each function has its own agent, with a name, a job and a boundary. They read the primary sources, keep the landscape current, draft the documents and check every load-bearing claim before I see it. Nothing reaches you unverified, and everything is labeled as sourced or inferred.

A workspace of your own.

Your company gets its own BioAlma workspace: pipeline, trials, investigators, documents, and the views built for your questions. Where it runs, and what happens to it afterwards, is set in each engagement.

A channel.

You talk to your agents where you already work, in Slack, Teams or WhatsApp, the way you would message a report: a question to the intelligence agent, a request to the business development agent, a draft back in the thread. I am in every thread, and anything that carries weight passes the fact check and my signature before you act on it. The channels are set up in the first week of an engagement.

Principles

How the work is kept honest. These hold in every engagement.

Information work and physical work are different jobs. I take the first. Your partners keep the second.
Agents fail quietly, so the design plans for it. Read the primary source, not the digest. Verify every load-bearing claim at the source before a person sees it. Label what is sourced and what is inferred.
One agent builds, another checks the sources, and a person decides what is good enough to act on.
Say which is which: what an agent did on its own, what an assistant did with a person driving, and what a person did.
Your information stays in your workspace. Nothing from one client's work enters another's.
Decisions are written down with their reasons and the facts they rested on, so they can be revisited when the facts change.

Two shapes of engagement

The retainer.

A fixed number of days per week, month by month, for a function you need staffed now. Most engagements take this shape.

The foundation.

Three months to build the commercial and strategic base of a young company: a diagnostic, the market map, structured customer interviews, the business plan with its financial model, and the hiring plan. For a company that has the science and the money and no commercial function yet.

Both are priced per engagement, as a monthly fee, platform included.

What stays with you

Agents supply a great deal. Three things they do not supply: context, meaning which question matters this week; judgment, meaning someone accountable signs every decision; and aspiration, meaning what the company wants to become.

The decisions stay with you. The judgment you do not hold alone. In the seat, my work is to help you ask the right questions, of the machine and of the evidence, and to say what I think before you decide. When the machine has an answer and you have to sign, I am on your side of the table.

There is one more thing a small company has to keep in the loop, and it is why a neurologist does this work. Biotech is a third-person industry: endpoints, enrollment curves, hazard ratios. The fewer people a company has, the more it matters that one of them asks the first-person question: what is it like to be the patient at the other end of this program. I ask it.

Start

Write to me with the date on your calendar and the function you need covered. I reply within two business days, and the first conversation costs nothing and commits you to nothing.

Your details are used only to reply. They are not added to any mailing list.

Disclosures

BioAlma is the platform I built. It is part of every engagement. Each client's information stays inside its own workspace and never enters work for anyone else. Case reports and features are never a pitch, and no client is named anywhere on this site without written permission.

Daniel Branco, MD, PhD, MBA, is a physician-scientist and venture builder: a neurologist, Harvard-trained neuroscientist and biotech executive. He builds BioAlma, a human-operated agentic intelligence platform for biotech, and writes the CoCreating.Bio newsletter.