Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Bob Christmas · Baruch S. Blumberg Institute · August 2026
A translational research organization that also runs lab space is really selling three different things to three different people: bench space to a founder, a collaboration to a partner, and a mission to a funder. Below are the United States segments each of those sits in, the titles that decide, and roughly how many are there.
Early stage therapeutics companies in the Philadelphia to Princeton corridor
The nearest market, and the one where a physical decision is being made about where the science actually sits. Small teams, no facilities function, and a founder who is choosing a building at the same time as choosing a first hire. Proximity does most of the work here.
Who signs: founder or chief executive, chief scientific officer, head of operations, and where the round is fresh, the board member who wrote the check.
900 to 1,200
life science employers across the greater Philadelphia and central New Jersey corridor
US preclinical and early clinical companies
The wider version of the same buyer, and the group most likely to be looking for a collaborator rather than a landlord. Antiviral and liver focused work narrows this list sharply, which is the point: a narrow list of named companies beats a broad list of plausible ones.
Who signs: chief scientific officer, head of research, chief business officer, founder.
2,800 to 3,400
US therapeutics companies with payroll operating before commercial stage
Larger biopharma with an external innovation function
The hardest seat on this page to reach and the most valuable one to hold. These teams exist specifically to find work like this, they are small, they are named, and they are contacted constantly by people who have not read anything they published. That last part is the opening.
Who signs: VP of external innovation, head of search and evaluation, therapeutic area lead, head of business development.
120 to 180
US biopharma companies large enough to run a dedicated partnering or scouting team
University technology transfer offices
The group that sees a spinout before it exists. A small, precisely countable, permanently under contacted population, and unusually willing to talk because their own metric is companies formed rather than deals closed. One relationship here can produce a stream rather than a single introduction.
Who signs: director of technology transfer, licensing manager, associate vice president for research, entrepreneurship program lead.
220 to 300
US universities and research institutions operating a formal technology transfer office
Diagnostics and research tools companies
Adjacent rather than obvious, which is why they get skipped. Early detection work sits naturally beside them, they buy collaboration rather than space, and they move faster than therapeutics companies because their development cycles are shorter.
Who signs: chief executive at the smaller end, VP of research and development, head of partnerships, chief medical officer.
1,400 to 1,800
US diagnostics, laboratory and research tools employers
Disease foundations and philanthropic funders
A real market with no map. Liver disease, hepatitis and cancer foundations, family offices with a personal reason, and corporate giving programs all fund work like this, and none of them are listed anywhere by what they actually care about. Said plainly rather than dressed up: this group is reached by name and by program, never by list.
Who signs: program officer, executive director, head of research grants, and at family offices the principal.
No register by disease area
identified one at a time from published grants and program pages; the difficulty is the reason the segment stays open

Where the openings are

1
Three offers, three buyers, one channel. Bench space, scientific partnership and philanthropy do not share a decision maker and do not respond to the same sentence. A single outreach effort tends to keep returning to whichever of the three answers first, and the other two quietly go unworked for years.
2
The tenancy decision has a visible trigger. A first institutional round, a grant award, a lease ending, a founder leaving a faculty post. All of those are public, all of them happen on a date, and the window in which a building gets chosen is measured in weeks. Watching a few thousand companies for that trigger is a mechanical job.
3
Technology transfer offices are a high yield list that rarely gets worked. Between 220 and 300 of them in the country, every one of them holding early companies that need somewhere to go, all of them reachable by name, and few of them contacted deliberately. It is one of the smallest segments here and probably the most productive per contact.
4
Scouting teams reply to evidence, not to introductions. The external innovation seat receives dozens of unread approaches a week and answers the ones that reference the specific thing they are looking for. That means the message has to be written for one person, at scale, which is a machinery problem rather than a science one. That is the part we build, and we hand it over when it works.
Built from public registries covering US employers and public sector classifications, counts banded deliberately. Owner only and very small entities are not published in this data, so these figures describe organizations with payroll rather than the whole field. Sector codes are self reported. Foundations and philanthropic funders are not enumerated by disease area anywhere public and are described rather than counted. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
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