Meet Ali Pashazadeh

Ali is CEO of Treehill Partners, the financial and strategic advisory firm he co-founded after a career spanning medicine, investment banking, and biotech strategy. A trained surgeon who has also worked at Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Blackstone, he brings an unusually broad perspective to drug development, combining clinical experience with capital markets, corporate strategy, and operational turnaround work.

At Treehill, Ali advises companies on complex corporate situations, biotech restructuring, clinical trial recovery, and development strategy. His work focuses on helping drug developers make better decisions earlier by integrating clinical, commercial, partnering, and financing perspectives into development planning. In a difficult funding environment, he has become an outspoken voice on the need for more disciplined trial design, clearer target product profiles, and development plans that reflect the market an asset will face at launch.

“We review hundreds of situations every quarter where clinical programs are going or have gone wrong, and in the overwhelming majority of cases the molecule was not the problem. The study design was wrong, the comparator was wrong, the endpoints were not commercially relevant, or nobody had assessed whether the competitive landscape would still support the product by the time the data arrived.”

“I started as a biochemist looking at the chemical pathology of breast cancer, graduated as a clinician from St Mary’s 31 years ago, and assumed I would spend my life practising medicine. I still practise acute care, which I love and which keeps me grounded in what actually matters – patients. But the journey from the lab bench to Goldman Sachs to Blackstone to building Treehill was never a plan. It was a series of moments where I realized that the problems I found most compelling sat at the intersection of science, medicine, strategy, and capital… and as we built the firm, we realized yet more vantage points needed to be included, and have acted accordingly.”