Jumpstart your conference experience with a lively morning speed networking! This informal networking session is the perfect chance to meet fellow participants and connect with your conference peers right from the start. Grab a cup of coffee, engage in conversations, and kick off the conference with a bang. Don't miss out on this fantastic opportunity to make new connections, share insights, and lay the groundwork for a memorable conference journey.

What if the most dangerous moment in drug development is not a failed clinical trial—but the day a team starts work without a clear picture of the approved product they are trying to create? End-in-mind thinking forces R&D teams to define their destination before they chart the course. This session explores how the Target Product Profile, when treated as a living strategic tool rather than a regulatory formality, transforms program decision-making—and how portfolio prioritization frameworks built on the same principle allow organizations to invest with conviction, cut with confidence, and ultimately deliver more medicines to more patients.

Early-stage development assets offer significant strategic flexibility in terms of indication selection and prioritization compared to those in late-stage development. This presentation explores the framing of strategic options when early-stage asset teams consider multiple indications to pursue, the implications on asset valuations, e.g., probability and value dependencies, and the appropriate valuation approaches to facilitate investment decision-making and cross-asset portfolio prioritization.

Case example of a large Biopharma's journey implementing a quarterly portfolio prioritization (QPP) process that transformed R&D decision-making. By introducing an objective, data-driven framework aligned with strategic priorities we added significant portfolio value, fostered innovation, and created budget capacity to fund new value-adding development projects.

As biopharma R&D increasingly serves a global market, asset development must account for the need for several regions, each with development strategies tailored to specific regulatory requirements, healthcare-system realities, and market access approaches. Program management functions therefore need to move beyond a headquarters-centric model toward an integrated global operating approach. This session explores how organizations can get the balance right: enabling regionally tailored development strategies and strong leadership of regional execution, while maintaining global alignment, efficient ways of working, and integrated operations across the full asset-development lifecycle. We will discuss the practical needs that emerge when regional realities meet global development priorities, and how program management can connect local execution, cross-regional coordination, and enterprise-level decision making to accelerate development without compromising strategic coherence.

Flagship Pioneering founds and builds innovative biotechnology companies around novel platform technologies. Each platform is capable of addressing many therapeutic areas, creating a vast opportunity space to navigate under compressed timelines. To meet this challenge, Flagship built a dedicated, centralized team combining scientific, strategic, and analytical expertise with a unique mandate: develop bespoke pipeline strategies that identify the highest-value therapeutic directions before a traditional pipeline exists. This presentation describes our framework for translating platform capabilities into clearly defined therapeutic opportunities ready for investment decisions, the role of AI-enabled tools in supporting this process, and key learnings and future directions.

Once the deal team delivers at signing and closing, the integration challenge takes center stage: integrating pipelines, preserving scientific momentum, and retaining the people who built them. Whether the value resides in a single asset, a platform, or a full portfolio, this session explores the operational complexities of integration—from protecting regulatory submissions to rebuilding team structures—and what it takes to protect what you paid for.

AI and machine learning are increasingly being applied to support portfolio and asset-level decision-making—but where do they truly add value? This session shares real-world use cases across both early and late-stage drug development, including target product profiles (TPP), timelines, competitive landscape assessment, development scenarios, and probability of technical and regulatory success (PTRS). The discussion will highlight where AI/ML has been successfully deployed, where it has fallen short, and the practical ways of working between portfolio teams and data science functions. Attendees will gain a grounded perspective on how to apply AI to improve decision quality, evaluate trade-offs, and strengthen portfolio outcomes.

AI agents have the potential to significantly increase the efficiency of routine tasks in the workplace as well as extract additional value from disparate sources used in these workstreams. In this presentation we review a real-world example of design and implementation of an AI agent in the context of pharmaceutical portfolio analytics. We also discuss key challenges encountered and lessons learned for future applications.

Pharma organizations invest heavily in building robust pipelines and sophisticated project management systems, yet many still struggle to convert execution insights into effective portfolio decisions. The root cause isn’t a lack of data—it’s the behavioral and decision dynamics that undermine how that data is interpreted, governed, and acted upon. Misaligned incentives, delayed insights, and fragmented governance structures create a persistent disconnect between strategy and real-time project realities. This session examines why good systems fail to produce good decisions, where portfolio decision-making breaks down, and how leading organizations overcome these barriers. Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of the human and structural factors driving the portfolio dilemma.

In US commercial pharma, we rarely have the full picture. Regulations shift, markets move, and data remains fragmented, so some level of unknown is always present. Yet most dashboards are built as if completeness is achievable, creating a gap between what systems show and how decisions are made.  In practice, leaders fill these gaps with judgment, often outside dashboards in Excel or PowerPoint. This session challenges the idea of “complete” dashboards and explores how to design systems that incorporate human insight and work effectively with uncertainty.

Establishing governance across the breadth of drug development and associated stakeholders can be a challenge. Lilly has two primary governing bodies: Early Phase, Discovery through Phase 2; and Late Phase, Phase 3 and beyond. Lilly leverages a Commercial Decision Process as the primary bridge between the two.  Additional measures established to ensure seamless transitions and efficiencies will be presented.