Ali Pashazadeh

Ali Pashazadeh is the founder, chairman, and chief executive of Treehill Partners, a global healthcare advisory firm that provides strategic and financial counsel across the life-sciences value chain. He occupies an unusual triple vantage point: a trained trauma and reconstructive surgeon who still practices acute and emergency care, a healthcare investor, and a former investment banker whose two-decade Wall Street career included Goldman Sachs, UBS, and Blackstone.

Pashazadeh appeared on Open Door Salon alongside Jon Rees, co-founder and CEO of MitoRx Therapeutics, for a conversation on GLP-1 drugs: the benefits society is seeing and the side effects the industry is still working to understand. Speaking from the emergency room, Pashazadeh described seeing atypical complications, kidney stones and visual disturbances, in patients on GLP-1s, and cautioned that the field is still in its infancy.

His core argument was biological: GLP-1s do something therapeutics rarely do, shutting down an entire system, and it would be naive to expect no long-term consequences, whether a patient stays on the drug or comes off it. The answer, he argued, is real-world evidence, following patients over time rather than relying on the “driving test” of a fixed clinical study.

From the investment seat, Pashazadeh noted how fast sentiment had shifted: as GLP-1 prices fell and the category became a large-cap pharma and government play, investors stepped back from smaller players, much as they did during COVID. His throughline across all three of his careers, he said, is doing the best thing for the patient, now at the scale of a whole population rather than one operating table.