"Just Get More Data, Bro": What Five VCs Really Want From Advanced Therapy Founders in 2026

What emerged from this session wasn't a tidy checklist. It was something more useful: a picture of how far the goalposts have moved, and why the founders who understand that are the ones getting funded.

If you weren't in the room, here's what you missed, and what it tells you about where the next twelve months are heading.

The bar has moved, and it keeps moving

Rogalska opened with a story that should reassure some founders and terrify others. Ysios backed Neurona Therapeutics (later acquired by UCB Pharma) on the strength of deep, durable first-patient responses. Her verdict: with that same data package today, she'd make the same call again.

But she was equally clear that the same firm backed Splice Bio on a much lighter data package, convinced instead by the strategy and the platform's potential. The lesson: it's not that investors want more data full stop. It's that the amount and type of proof required depends entirely on where the field's benchmarks sit right now, and those benchmarks only move in one direction.

Rodriguez made the point even sharper with a live example. Invivo backed a company in the allogeneic cell therapy space (later acquired by AstraZeneca) in 2023 on a preclinical package. Fast forward to 2026, and companies in that same space have since published clinical data. The clinical bar for that indication is now higher, so much so that Invivo has decided not to invest further in it at all. They've moved on to the next wave: solid tumours.

The takeaway for founders is uncomfortable but important. Your investment case isn't judged against the standard your predecessors met. It's judged against whoever raised most recently in your space.

Data won't save you: it's the plan that does

Ask any of these investors what evidence proves preclinical results will translate clinically, and you get a surprisingly unanimous answer: there isn't one.

Rogalska put it bluntly: every failed gene therapy programme had great data and strong clinical efficacy signals, and still failed to translate into clinical benefit. Shumskiy backed this up from the biology side: we simply don't understand enough about how findings in mice, or even monkeys, map onto human outcomes. More data points, more species, they help, but they don't eliminate the leap of faith.

So what actually buys investor confidence? Not the data itself, but what the team does when the data inevitably runs into a wall. Rogalska called it comfort in the execution plan: the regulatory strategy, the pivot options, the team's track record of adapting when (not if) obstacles show up. Higgs agreed, tying it directly to team pedigree: founders who've navigated a previous exit have a framework for handling failure that first-timers simply don't.

If your pitch leans entirely on how good your data is, you're pitching to the wrong criteria. The real question investors are asking is: what happens when this doesn't go to plan?

Manufacturing is not a Series B problem

One of the more pointed exchanges of the session concerned CMC and manufacturing, and how early it needs to be locked down.

Rogalska's answer: from preclinical, full stop. Around half of FDA response letters cite CMC issues, and she's seen manufacturing concerns hold back drugs with genuinely positive clinical readouts. For Neurona, in-house allogeneic cell production was diligenced as deeply as the clinical package, because "the product is a process" in advanced therapies in a way it simply isn't in other modalities. Her line was stark: an unresolved manufacturing red flag, confirmed by an independent expert, is serious enough that Ysios would walk away from an otherwise strong deal.

Shumskiy added a nuance worth noting: gene therapy founders repurposing an already-validated viral vector face a smaller manufacturing risk than cell therapy founders proving a novel process can scale to commercial volumes. If you're in the latter camp, that scalability proof point needs to exist well before you're asking anyone for a term sheet.

The commercial question nobody wants to ask early, but should

Shumskiy's answer to "how should founders demonstrate a realistic commercial pathway" doubled as a warning about where the field has over-invested. Ultra-rare disease indications make regulatory approval easier, he argued, but they don't always make commercial sense. His example: a landmark hearing-restoration gene therapy from Regeneron that, despite the science being genuinely breakthrough, is essentially being given away for free, because the addressable market was never going to support a commercial price.

His preferred model is indications with either large commercial potential from day one, or a rare disease starting point with a credible path to a bigger population. He pointed to Verve Therapeutics' hypercholesterolaemia programme (built on PCSK9 knockout) as the template: start in a well-defined genetic population, prove safety and efficacy, then expand outward.

For founders, that's a call to model the commercial case at the same stage you're modelling the clinical one, not after Phase 2.

Financing has changed, and the change is structural

The panel didn't sugarcoat how much harder fundraising has become. Higgs was direct: to secure the same funding you'd have got three years ago, you now need to be significantly further along, whatever your modality or indication.

Rogalska's advice on capital efficiency was less about spending less and more about defining the right inflection point: the next round should land you at a milestone significant enough to attract new capital or a pharma partnership, with enough buffer built in that delays don't derail you. Her warning was concrete: several companies cut workforce dramatically in August 2026 purely to extend runway, because they hadn't built that buffer in.

Rodriguez's firm has responded by getting creative rather than raising the bar: exploring non-dilutive funding routes (plentiful in Spain, she noted) and capital-efficient paths like generating early clinical data via China-based trial routes.

On syndicate strength, Shumskiy offered a genuinely double-edged view: big names in your cap table signal credibility, but in this environment they can also arrive with what he called "draconian terms" that box out earlier investors and founders alike. His advice: prioritise investors with follow-on capacity over investors with the biggest name, even if that means accepting a less impressive term sheet today.

The uncomfortable truth about Europe

The session's final audience question landed the hardest: why do European investors remain so much more risk-averse than their US counterparts, and why has that been true for two decades?

Nobody on the panel defended the status quo. Rodriguez recounted trying to raise a round where US investors wanted to wait for European comparables to generate data, while European investors wanted to wait for the US companies to prove it first, a genuine catch-22. Shumskiy went further, revealing his own fund has effectively become an American fund for its second vehicle, because fundraising simply moves faster in the US. His diagnosis: it's structural, tied to how capital moves and how regulation works in Europe, and the fix isn't down to individual investors. It's down to EU policy.

For European founders, that's worth internalising. The playing field genuinely isn't level yet, so a fundraising strategy that only targets European capital is starting with one hand tied.

What founders should actually do next

Asked for one practical recommendation each, the panel converged hard on a few points:

• Broaden beyond specialists. Shumskiy's advice was to actively court generalist investors, many of whom made money in AI and are now looking to diversify into biotech with fresh capital and less rigid modality bias.
• Don't skimp on the pitch itself. His other line landed as the most quotable of the session: make the wrapper as good as the candy. Great science presented in a messy data room with an ugly deck loses to a strong story told well, every time.
• Differentiation over data volume. Both Rodriguez and Rogalska converged here: in a crowded field, the question isn't "do you have enough data," it's "why is your approach better than the fifteen others chasing the same problem."
• Play the long game with relationships. Higgs' advice was less glamorous but arguably the most durable: adjust your expectations for how long this takes, and keep every investor relationship warm with regular updates, whether they've said yes yet or not.

Why this matters beyond the room

What made this panel valuable wasn't a single hot take, it was five investors with genuinely different mandates (pre-seed to Series C, generalist to advanced-therapy specialist, European to transatlantic) independently arriving at the same conclusion: the story used to be enough, and now it isn't. What replaces it is proof of execution, not just proof of science.

That's exactly the kind of conversation that only happens with this calibre of investor in one room, and it's a small taste of what's coming at Advanced Therapies Europe 2027.

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