I hope everyone is having a good start to the year. I have been busy working on a new project, but more on that later. This post focuses on business development (BD) roles in pharma.

BD in pharma is where the deals happen, they handle licensing, M&A, strategic partnerships, alliance management and more. I pulled 410 BD-related job postings from the past 6 months to see what companies are hiring, what they're paying, and what the roles actually look like.

Who's Hiring

80% of BD postings are management-level, with a median salary of $187K and a 47% premium over individual contributor roles. This is the most top-heavy function I've analyzed on PharmaPayWatch.

AbbVie dominates BD hiring with 110 postings, more than the next two companies (Abbott at 57 and Medtronic at 33) combined. Johnson & Johnson (29) and Bristol Myers Squibb (24) round out the top five.

But "BD" means different things at different companies. Nearly three-quarters of AbbVie's 110 BD postings are Allergan Aesthetics field sales roles - territory managers selling BOTOX Cosmetic, JUVEDERM, and SkinMedica to aesthetic practices. Only a handful are strategic pipeline BD (e.g., "Director, Oncology Business Development").

Abbott's mix is similarly broad: diagnostics informatics sales reps, Lingo biosensing partnership managers, and structural heart strategic partnerships. Medtronic is the closest to traditional BD of the top three, with corporate development associates evaluating M&A targets and surgical alliance account managers.

One of the things I've noticed looking at these postings is that "business development" is one of the most overloaded titles in pharma. Depending on the company, it can mean anything from field sales to negotiating licensing deals.

Diagnostics Companies Are Building BD Teams to Sell Back to Pharma

Precision diagnostics companies are actively hiring BD leaders to partner with pharma. Caris Life Sciences, Exact Sciences, Natera, and Tempus AI combined for 18 BD postings in this window...

This is a longer post. To read about diagnostics BD hiring, the management vs. individual contributor trends, and salary information, read the full post on PharmaPayWatch.

Our New Project

If you're in one of these BD or strategy roles, or you're an analyst covering the companies that hire them, you might find RxDataLab useful. RxDataLab tracks pharma and biotech company activity from regulatory filings, clinical trials, and institutional ownership data. Two things relevant to this post:

• Strategic Signals Weekly tracks licensing deals, strategic alternatives announcements, and financing events directly from SEC filings. Companies don't always put out a press release for these, but they do have to file with the SEC. The live dashboard updates daily.

• BioHedge Monitor tracks Schedule 13D/13G filings from biotech-focused hedge funds. When an institutional investor crosses the 5% threshold or files an activist 13D, it shows up here with ownership percentages, position changes, and filing gaps. We show these changes with context meaning recent trial changes/updates, market movements, and relevant regulatory filings are shown right alongside them.

All data comes from primary sources (SEC EDGAR, ClinicalTrials.gov) with links to original filings. If you're in BD or strategy or this looks like something you might use, please reach out! Just reply to this email (or me directly at nick@pharmapaywatch.com).