The Target-Disease Model Is Dead. AI Can’t Fix It — Yet
Abstract
The target-disease model that built modern pharma is dead — not because AI killed it, but because biology walked away from it. As molecular mechanisms are mapped with increasing granularity, biological reality reveals itself as combinatorial, redundant, and fragmented. This erodes statistical power, drives combination therapies, inflates trial costs, and pushes payers into an affordability crisis just as the patent super-cliff removes more than $200bn in protected revenue by 2030.
AI can accelerate exploitation of existing paradigms — predicting responders, validating targets, ranking combinations, and reducing clinical waste — but it remains bounded by the known and cannot yet originate new biological frameworks. In other words, AI can navigate the rubble of the old paradigm, but it cannot rebuild the edifice that used to sit on it.
The strategic consequence is profound: innovation shifts from discovering single molecules to navigating combinatorial biological spaces under brutal economic constraints. In his talk, Matthias P. Schönermark will map why the old model died, where AI actually creates value today, and what a viable playbook for post-blockbuster biopharma might look like.
Speaker
Prof. Dr. Matthias P. Schönermark
Chief Strategy Officer
Kintiga
Prof. Dr. med. Matthias P. Schönermark is Chief Strategy Officer at Kintiga, a pan-European market access and regulatory consulting company. Trained as a head & neck surgeon with a Ph.D. in molecular oncology, Matthias has more than three decades experience in strategy consulting (BCG, A.T. Kearney), advising the leadership of health insurance and provider organizations, as well as of medtech and pharma companies on strategic management, innovation and organizational change. As a co-founder of SKC in 2005 (now Kintiga), Matthias holds an unrivalled track record of solving complex and demanding market access challenges, especially in the orphan drug and oncology sector and is one of the most experienced negotiation leaders in reimbursement and pricing for the German AMNOG procedure.
Agenda
18:30 - Doors open
19:00 - Talk starts
20:00 - Drinks and networking