Dozens of companies, hundreds of millions in capital, all circling the same six or eight validated targets-competing on decimal points instead of asking whether the target was the right bet at all.
Walk the poster hall at any oncology conference in 2026 and you'll see the same six or eight targets wearing different logos. KRAS. TIGIT. Claudin 18.2. The MAPK pathway. Dozens of companies, hundreds of millions in capital, all circling validated biology because validated biology is fundable.
At BIO 2026, Mary Rozenman, CBO and CFO of Insitro, said the quiet part out loud during the "Beyond the Hype" AI panel: "How do we know it's working?" Her answer was uncomfortable. So many companies are chasing the same validated targets, doing essentially the same thing, that the industry has manufactured near-term success while pushing risk downstream, hoping the molecule is just different enough to earn a sliver of market share. Her verdict was blunt: reducing critical risk has gone too far.
This paper names the pattern, traces its mechanics, and gives investors and BD leaders a framework for telling the difference between a genuinely differentiated oncology asset and a well-dressed me-too.
Call it what it is: convergent de-risking. It's what happens when an entire industry's capital allocation converges on the same narrow set of biological targets because those targets have already cleared the hardest diligence question-does hitting this thing do anything at all in humans-leaving everyone to compete on the easy question instead: can we hit it slightly better, slightly safer, slightly more selectively.
Convergent de-risking isn't a failure of any single company's strategy. It's a systemic outcome of how oncology capital gets deployed. A validated target reduces biological risk, which lowers the cost of capital, which shortens the time to a term sheet, which makes the next fund more likely to back the next company doing the same thing. Every individual decision is rational. The aggregate outcome is a field where a dozen companies are running expensive Phase 2 programs against the same mechanism, and the actual scientific question-does the industry have enough validated, differentiated targets to sustain this much capital-never gets asked.
"So many companies are chasing the same validated targets, doing essentially the same thing-reducing critical risk has gone too far."
Mary Rozenman . CBO & CFO, Insitro
Rozenman's framing matters because she's not arguing against de-risking as a concept. She's arguing that the industry has substituted target validation for opportunity validation. Those are not the same thing. A target being real and druggable tells you almost nothing about whether your specific program, in a field of competitors also hitting that target, will matter commercially in six years.
Convergent de-risking does not eliminate risk. It relocates it. Early biological risk-does this pathway matter-gets swapped for late commercial risk: does this molecule win in a field of near-identical competitors, at a moment when payers are actively hunting for reasons to prefer the cheapest option in a therapeutic class.
That trade looks attractive on a term sheet because commercial risk is further away, harder to model, and conveniently someone else's problem by the time it materializes. But it is still risk-arguably worse risk, because differentiation on safety margin or target engagement is genuinely hard to prove, harder to message to physicians, and nearly impossible to price a premium against.
Nick Mordwinkin, CBO and Chief Strategy Officer at Trace Neuroscience, described this dynamic plainly at BIO: in crowded target spaces-he pointed to TIE2, where large players like Gilead are also active-the competitive conversation collapses to margins, safety signals, and target engagement, not "does this work." Everyone's molecule works, more or less. The fight is over fractional advantages in a category where the target itself stopped being the differentiator years ago.
The instructive case from BIO 2026 comes from Ben Zeskind, co-founder, president and CEO of Immuneering. His company works in the RAF-MEK/MAPK pathway, about as validated as oncology biology gets. By the logic of convergent de-risking, Immuneering should be just another entrant fighting over margins.
It isn't, because of where in the pathway it chose to intervene. Immuneering went further downstream, targeting MEK specifically, on the logic that cancer cells have a much harder time evolving resistance around a downstream node than an upstream one. That single positioning decision produced a real clinical result in first-line pancreatic cancer: roughly 17 months of benefit, against a historical baseline closer to seven. Patients on the drug also retained weight and muscle mass, because the mechanism avoids triggering the wasting that pancreatic cancer patients typically experience on other regimens. The program is now in Phase 3.
This is what de-risked and first-in-class can look like at the same time. Immuneering didn't chase a novel, unvalidated target to prove a differentiation story. It took a thoroughly validated pathway and found a genuinely under-exploited position within it-one that changed the clinical outcome rather than nudging a side-effect profile. The target wasn't new. The insight was.
None of this happens because scientists or founders lack imagination. It happens because the incentive architecture of biotech financing rewards speed to a defensible thesis over the higher-risk, higher-reward work of finding new targets. First-in-class, truly novel-target programs take longer to validate, are harder to underwrite, and fail more often in ways that are expensive and public. Fast-follow programs on validated targets are easier to explain to an investment committee, easier to benchmark against comps, and easier to sell to a partner who wants a shot on goal with a known mechanism.
Rozenman's prescription at BIO was direct: use the current generation of Al and data-integration tools to go hunting for additional and novel targets-run more first-in-class therapeutic programs with a high probability of success, rather than spending that computational and financial firepower on endless optimization around biology that ten other companies already own. The tools exist. The industry is mostly using them to get incrementally better at a crowded game instead of using them to find a different game.
If convergent de-risking is the disease, the diligence process needs new questions. Here is a practical framework for distinguishing genuine differentiation from de-risking theater before capital goes out the door.
The industry does not have a shortage of validated targets. It has a shortage of validated opportunities-a shortage the current wave of Al-driven drug discovery tools is, so far, better at hiding than solving. Fixing that starts with capital that's willing to ask harder questions before the term sheet, not after the fourth competitor's Phase 3 reads out.
At Scimitar, Akira Robinson serves as Partner, Commercialization. He operates at the intersection of commercial strategy, launch execution, and market access, advising biopharma executive teams at critical moments where launch readiness directly determines asset value and time to market. With 20 years of experience across life sciences, diagnostics, biologics, and digital medicine, his work tackles complex commercial challenges for teams across the US and globally. His expertise spans the full commercial value chain—including launch planning, licensing, market access, pricing, analytics, marketing, sales distribution, and patient services across therapy areas, including: oncology, radiopharmaceuticals (RLT), rare disease, CNS, cardiology, and gastroenterology.
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