Month: November 2025

Corporate News

Danforth Health Expands Market Access Capabilities with Appointment of Beth Ann Bender and Integration of FieldQuest Payer Panel

WALTHAM, Mass. – November 13, 2025 – Danforth Health, Inc. today announced an expansion of its Market Access & Value practice with the addition of Beth Ann Bender, a seasoned expert in payer insights and stakeholder engagement. Bender brings over 25 years of experience in healthcare market research and is the founder of FieldQuest, whose curated payer panel will allow Danforth Health clients to capture rapid, high-quality insights that inform access and reimbursement strategy from early development through launch.

Bender will lead efforts to deepen payer insight capabilities across the commercialization lifecycle. Her proprietary approach and long-standing relationships with health plan and hospital system stakeholders will strengthen Danforth Health’s ability to generate fast, reliable input from the people who influence drug coverage and reimbursement decisions.

At the core of this expanded capability is the integration of the FieldQuest payer panel – a trusted network of healthcare decision-makers who determine what treatments and therapies are covered by insurance plans. Engaging this panel will allow life science companies to test ideas, validate assumptions, and hear directly from real-world experts who shape access for patients.

“Beth Ann’s experience and network accelerate our ability to deliver meaningful payer insights to clients preparing for launch and beyond,” said Scotty Bowman, Managing Director, Danforth Health Market Access & Value. “By integrating FieldQuest’s curated payer panel and insights with our current strategy, evidence, and pricing and reimbursement services, we can move even faster from insight to action for clients preparing to launch or grow their brands.”

“Joining Danforth allows me to bring the FieldQuest model to a broader stage,” said Bender. “I’ve always believed that better access begins with better insight. Now, we can combine real-time payer feedback with the strategic and operational muscle needed to turn that feedback into smarter decisions and stronger patient access.”

About Danforth Health

Danforth Health is a unified platform purpose-built to empower life science innovation. By integrating the capabilities of best-in-class affiliates, Danforth Health provides tailored, cross-functional support across finance and human resources, investor and public relations, discovery and development, regulatory and clinical, commercial and marketing, market research and analytics, and market access and value. The model is built for flexibility, scalability, and impact – serving life science companies at any stage and helping them move faster, smarter, and more efficiently to achieve transformative outcomes for patients. Headquartered in Waltham, Massachusetts, Danforth Health has partnered with more than 1,800 life science companies around the world. Learn more at www.danforthhealth.com.

Insights

If You’re Going to JPM, Make it Count.

Breaking Bad Biotech: Practical Advice for Highly Effective Biotech Organizations

Expert insights from Gregg Beloff, Co-Founder and Managing Director of Danforth Health.

If you’ve ever been to the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference, you know it’s less a conference and more a Jungleland – a place where the hopeful and the hardened all show up looking for a breakthrough. The energy is electric, the pace is relentless, and every conversation feels like it could change your company’s trajectory.

But from a CFO’s chair, it’s also something else: an enormous investment. Flights, hotels, receptions, prep work, opportunity cost — the tab adds up fast. If you’ve decided to attend, you must make the investment count.

JPM can be one of the highest-ROI weeks of your year or an expensive blur that drains both capital and focus. The difference lies in your purpose and your planning.

Treat JPM like a strategic investment

Think of JPM as an asset class in your annual operating plan. Before spending a dollar or booking a meeting, define what success looks like in measurable terms.

Start by defining your objectives: are you raising capital, building partnerships, or increasing visibility ahead of a milestone? Each goal requires a different playbook and different KPIs. For example:

  • Investor ROI: How many qualified, decision-making investors will you meet?
  • Partnership traction: Which BD conversations could realistically lead to follow-up diligence?
  • Visibility return: Which events or moments get your story in front of the right audiences?

Just like any investment, JPM needs a thesis and a disciplined approach to executing it.

Focus on Yield, Not Volume

It’s easy to fall into the JPM trap of equating busy with productive. Back-to-back meetings look impressive on paper, but not all of them will actually move the needle.

The best outcomes derive from fewer, more strategic conversations that align with your financing or partnering objectives.

  • Vet every meeting: Is this a potential investor, or an information-gathering analyst?
  • Confirm who’s actually attending: decision-maker or screener?
  • Leave room for recalibration and reflection: time is capital, too.

The week’s real winners are rarely the busiest people in the lobby. They’re the ones whose calendars were curated with purpose.

Manage the Signal-to-Noise Ratio

JPM week is chaos: receptions stacked on panels stacked on hallway introductions. Ask yourself:

  • Which events actually align with your company’s capital or BD strategy?
  • Where will your CEO or CBO’s time have the greatest multiplier effect?
  • What can wait for quieter weeks, when inboxes and attention spans have cleared?

Think portfolio theory: not every opportunity deserves investment.

Make every dollar work harder

Treat JPM the way you’d approach any capital-intensive project — with discipline and intent.

  • Craft a crisp narrative: Tie your science to your strategy and your strategy to value creation. Investors should understand your story in two minutes flat.
  • Pre-plan your follow-ups: Don’t just “circle back.” Assign accountability for post-conference momentum.
  • Invest in presence wisely: Sometimes being seen in the right room creates more value than being everywhere at once.

Efficiency isn’t about doing less. It’s about ensuring every dollar and every hour generates tangible returns.

Close the loop

After JPM, debrief like you would after closing a financing round.

  • What relationships advanced your fundraising or partnership goals?
  • What intel will shape your capital or communications strategy?
  • Did the outcomes justify the spend?
  • What are the follow-ups/next steps, and who is accountable?

Treating JPM as a measurable investment — rather than an annual ritual — is how you turn noise into signal and activity into results.

The Bottom Line

In biotech, every decision is an investment — of time, attention, and capital. Treat JPM with the same financial discipline and focus you’d apply to any major investment. In a place where everyone’s chasing opportunity, the companies that win are the ones that plan, measure, and execute with purpose and intent.

Learn more about Danforth Health and connect with our expert team.

Insights

Talent Gaps & Layoffs in Biotech: Navigating the New Reality

Over the past two years, the biotech sector has weathered a difficult correction. Funding constraints and pipeline reprioritizations have led to waves of layoffs, creating leaner teams across the industry. Yet even as companies downsize, the need for specialized expertise has never been greater. The result is a widening talent gap – one that threatens productivity, continuity, and innovation.

Leaders at small and mid-sized biotech companies are being forced to make tough decisions: how to preserve institutional knowledge, sustain development momentum, and remain competitive with limited internal bandwidth.

Here are five takeaways for companies navigating this new workforce landscape:

1. Prioritize Core Expertise, Outsource the Rest

Not every role needs to be rebuilt internally. Identify which functions are critical to your intellectual property, regulatory strategy, or investor value story – and consider trusted external partners for everything else. Strategic outsourcing can allow you to execute on your business strategy while preventing burnout, reducing fixed costs, and ensuring continuity through development inflection points.

2. Reassess Organizational Design for Agility

Lean doesn’t have to mean overextended. Reassess how decisions have been made and consider if a smaller team could mean a more efficient approach, where bottlenecks exist, and which functions are duplicative. Flattening structures and empowering cross-functional project leads can help maintain momentum even with smaller teams.

3. Invest in Retention – Even When You’re Cutting Costs

After layoffs, there is often undesirable attrition, and the remaining team members often carry heavier workloads and higher stress. Retention depends on transparency, recognition, and growth opportunities. Simple actions, like reviewing and updating roles and responsibilities,  consistent communication about company direction, flexible work arrangements, or development stipends, can have an outsized impact on morale and loyalty.

4. Bridge Skill Gaps Through Partnerships and Interim Talent

Specialized expertise in areas like regulatory strategy, CMC, bioinformatics, and clinical operations is increasingly scarce. Interim or fractional experts can bridge capability gaps without the long-term cost of full-time hires, allowing your team to have the right level and amount of expertise as needed. If you are embracing a fractional model, look for experienced consultants or partner firms who understand biotech’s unique regulatory and operational nuances.

5. Revisit Workforce Planning Every Quarter

Embrace a just-in-time hiring model. While there is great talent in the market right now, hiring too far ahead of your needs can unnecessarily accelerate your cash burn. The market is shifting fast. What seemed essential six months ago may not be today. Building a rolling 3- to 6-month talent roadmap—aligned with your pipeline milestones and financing horizon—helps avoid reactionary hiring or deep cuts later on.

The Bottom Line

The biotech talent landscape is being reshaped in real time, but the need for great talent never goes away. In today’s environment, success will depend on strategic resourcing, organizational agility, and empathetic leadership. Companies that balance cost discipline with a thoughtful approach to people management will emerge stronger, more focused, and ready to capture opportunity as the market rebounds.

Danforth Health uniquely bridges both sides of the talent challenge — providing fractional experts to fill critical functional gaps. Our team can work with you to determine if a fractional resource is right for your business or if this is the time to invest in a full-time hire. Either way, we have the expertise and network to assess your needs, recruit the appropriate resources, and support their onboarding in a way that thoughtfully integrates them into your team quickly and efficiently.

Click here to schedule a free consultation about how we can support your talent needs.