Capital Isn’t the Constraint in Complex Modalities. Two Things Are.

Big Pharma is sitting on record dealmaking capacity - roughly $2.1 trillion by EY's 2026 estimate - against a patent cliff that puts more than $300 billion of branded revenue at risk of losing exclusivity before 2030. It has spent 2026 acquiring at a pace not seen since before the pandemic, with more than $130 billion of billion-dollar deals in the first half alone. In complex modalities, capital is not the constraint.

Two things are. The first is differentiated, de-risked assets. The second is the physical capacity to manufacture molecules that were never designed to be easy to make. Almost every funding pattern in the sector right now is the market working through those two scarcities.

You can see it modality by modality.

In radioligand therapy, the tell is what the money is actually buying. The wave of 2025 private rounds was raised to build isotope supply, manufacturing and distribution, not to fund a single clinical asset. The half-life is the business model, and the supply chain is the asset.

In ADCs, the science is the most de-risked of any complex modality, and the behaviour has moved on. Chinese biotechs now originate close to 90% of global ADC licensing, and fewer than 15 contract manufacturers worldwide can build one end to end. The value and the constraint both sit in the payload chemistry and the conjugation capacity, not the antibody.

In cell and gene therapy, the science works but the economics did not close. Cost of goods and reimbursement broke the model, so venture capital retreated by more than 60% from its peak and moved from the therapies to the platforms and the manufacturing behind them. It is the control experiment that proves the point: scientific promise attracts the first cheque, but only a workable manufacturing and payment model sustains it.

Underneath all of it sits the layer that has to build everything - the CDMO and CRO sector - now consolidating, reshoring under the BIOSECURE Act, and being repriced as the real bottleneck. A new facility takes three to five years to build and a year or more to transfer between sites. Demand can spike overnight. Capacity cannot.

Which sets up the forward call. As the science de-risks and the deals keep coming, the binding constraint migrates from the molecule to the capacity to make it, and then to the people who can design, transfer, qualify and run a complex-modality supply chain. By 2027, the scarcest input in the sector is human.

By 2027, the scarcest input in the sector is human.

That last point is where diligence usually goes quiet. Investors model cash runway to the next milestone with real rigour. Almost nobody models talent runway: whether the team, as currently built, can actually deliver that milestone, and whether a missing senior seat can be filled in time to matter.

So we built a tool for it. The Diligence Gap is a free, two-minute diagnostic for investors screening a new deal or reviewing a portfolio company. Enter the modality, the stage, the next value inflection and the team as it stands, and it shows which senior seats a business at that stage should have filled, which are exposed against the milestone, and how long each remaining hire realistically takes to make and land - measured against real executive search timelines, so a European hire and a US hire show genuinely different clocks. Where a seat cannot be filled inside the funded window, you see it.

See whether the leadership team can deliver the next milestone → Free, a few minutes, across radiopharma, ADC, and cell and gene therapy.

This is the short version. The full picture - the deal record across every modality, the six governing variables from drug pricing to tariffs to the China corridor, and the forward thesis to 2028 - is set out in our intelligence report, Money Is Everywhere. The Two Things It's Chasing Aren't. And if you are weighing where compensation needs to sit to land those hires, our compensation benchmarking is the companion piece.