
MoA vs. Moat: Agentic LLMs for Drug Competitor Mapping Cut Diligence Time 20×
The punchline Competitive analysis for drug assets isn’t a tidy table—it’s a scavenger hunt across press releases, registries, investor decks, and alias-riddled drug names. A new paper shows that scaffolded, web-native LLM agents can reliably enumerate true competitors for a given indication, then filter hallucinations with an LLM-as-judge, beating popular “deep research” tools and cutting analyst turnaround from ~2.5 days to ~3 hours. This matters now: the EU’s Joint Clinical Assessments (JCA) regime makes comparator choice visible and consequential; missing a relevant competitor can ripple into pricing, market access, and trial design. In short: MoA (mechanism of action) meets moat (defensible advantage)—and the moat is built from recall. ...