Want to know where Pharma is placing early portfolio bets? Look at their preclinical pipelines. That offers early signal on emerging targets, modality shifts and competitors resource concentration.

But aggregating that data (and keeping it up to date in real-time) at scale is hard - millions of data points scattered across patents, abstracts, presentations and company websites. That's where Sleuth comes in.

I used Sleuth to aggregate >500 preclinical oncology programs across 12 Pharma leaders and surface insights - here were 2 patterns that stood out:

1. Amongst these oncology powerhouses, half of all PC programs are unique

~50% pursue solo targets (~25%) or target combinations (~25%) that no other company in this group is pursuing. It's simultaneously true that Biotech is driving more industry R&D (>2/3 of recent FDA approvals came from biotech sponsors) and there's a long tail of independent Pharma exploration.

Even where multiple programs cluster (4+ in this peer set), most targets have limited late-stage development industry-wide, including MCL-1, SMARCA2, TEAD, MSLN and GPC3

2. Emerging modalities show extreme concentration, but most players hedge their bets

Across all 500+ programs, the split is what you'd expect: traditional small molecules dominate, with everything else from bispecifics, cell therapy, ADCs, radiopharma and degraders all clustered together.

Within each company, the strategic concentration can be more striking:

• ~75% of radiopharma programs are concentrated in just 3 companies (AZ, BMS, Novartis)
• ~75% of cell therapy programs are in 4 (AZ, Amgen, Roche, AbbVie)
• Merck alone has 40% of all preclinical trispecific oncology programs, while Roche / Genentech dominate in BsAbs

But here's the nuance: most companies hedge strategically. Only 2 of 12 lack any cell therapy or radiopharma and only 1 lacks ADCs. Companies maintain broad coverage while concentrating resources where they see advantage - balancing optionality with deliberate bets.