Enquirer Consulting Group

Reachable Buyer Map

Prepared for Dr. Kristeen Pareja-Navarro · EngramBio · August 2026
For a preclinical program, the buyer is not a patient and not a payer. It is a business development seat inside a company that needs a pipeline, and a small group of funders who back neuroscience before the clinic does. This map covers the United States: where those seats sit, who signs in each group, and roughly how many organizations are in each one. It describes the market rather than your business, and there is nothing to buy at the end of it.
Companies already running a dementia program
The tightest and most valuable group on this page. A company with an active Alzheimer's or dementia asset has a therapeutic area lead, a budget line and, more to the point, a stated position on what its pipeline is missing. Published pipeline reporting counts roughly 180 to 200 active clinical trials testing somewhere around 150 to 160 agents, with industry sponsoring about six in ten of them. The sponsor layer behind that is dozens of companies, not hundreds.
Who signs: head of search and evaluation, therapeutic area lead for neuroscience, VP of business development, chief scientific officer.
Dozens, not hundreds
industry sponsors behind the active dementia trials; small enough to name individually and to work by hand
Established US pharmaceutical companies
The wider partner market, including companies with no dementia asset today and a neuroscience history they are deciding whether to restart. Slower to move than the group above and a larger pool, and the segment where a mechanism that repairs rather than clears is a differentiator rather than a competitor.
Who signs: external innovation lead, VP of business development, head of scientific licensing, therapeutic area head.
400 to 500
US pharmaceutical employers with payroll on file, of which roughly 180 to 220 carry 250 or more people
Biotech and research-stage companies
Mid-cap and clinical-stage companies that need an asset more than they need another discovery platform. They move faster than large pharma, they negotiate differently, and they are the segment most likely to be looking for exactly one thing at any given moment.
Who signs: chief scientific officer, head of corporate development, CEO at founder-led companies, head of preclinical development.
800 to 900
US research and development companies with payroll on file, roughly 220 to 260 of them at 250 or more people
Non-dilutive funders and disease foundations
The channel that pays for the work before a partner will, and the one with the most predictable calendar on this page, because the deadlines are published a year ahead. Between 1,600 and 1,800 federal small business awards a year go to US companies across all fields, so the neuroscience slice is a competitive subset of that.
Who signs: program officer, scientific director, foundation research lead, challenge and accelerator selectors.
1,600 to 1,800 awards a year
federal small business awards to US companies across all fields; an award count rather than a company count, since one company can hold several
Venture and translational capital with a neuroscience thesis
Small, specific and entirely relationship-driven. Being straight about a limit: there is no public register of which funds will back a preclinical neurodegeneration asset, so this group cannot be pulled from any list. It is built name by name from what each fund has actually backed.
Who signs: partner or principal, venture scientist, scientific advisor, and the operating partner on later rounds.
No public register
assembled fund by fund from what has actually been backed, which is why the segment stays open
Academic and clinical translation partners
Not a buyer, and included because the map would be dishonest without it. Memory centers and academic neuroscience groups are where validation, investigators and eventual trial sites come from, and they are reached through a completely different door than a business development seat.
Who signs: principal investigator, center director, translational research lead, technology transfer officer.
A separate door
reached by scientific relationship rather than by a commercial approach, and worth keeping separate from the segments above

Where the openings are

1
The buyer is a seat, not a company. Search and evaluation, external innovation, therapeutic area lead. Those seats are re-scoped constantly, and a new one arrives with a mandate to find something. The moment a neuroscience portfolio gap opens is the moment the door opens, and it closes again once the gap is filled by somebody else.
2
Conferences reach scientists. Deals are signed by a different person. The people who understand a synapse repair mechanism on sight and the people who can sign a term sheet rarely sit in the same room, and almost never at the same event. Reaching the second group is a distribution problem rather than a scientific one.
3
The narrow mechanism is what makes this reachable. A mechanism aimed at repairing synapses rather than clearing a protein is only interesting to a specific subset of companies, and that subset is countable. Being able to name it in the dozens is what makes a written, targeted approach possible where a broad campaign would be noise.
4
Two calendars, running at once. Non-dilutive funders run on published deadlines. Business development runs on whenever a pipeline gap appears. Working both at the same time, watching the second while filing to the first, is mechanical work, and it is exactly the work that gets dropped when a small team is also running the science.
Built from public federal registry data covering US employers that file a benefit plan, current to the 2024 filing year, alongside published clinical pipeline reporting and federal award records. Counts are banded deliberately. Employer counts use plan participants as a headcount proxy and exclude owner-only and very small companies, sector codes are self-reported, and award counts are awards rather than companies. Investor and academic groups are not covered by any public register and are described rather than counted.
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