Landscape Opportunity | Pharma Strategy Blog

Strategic trends in the Pharmaceutical industry

By MaverickNY on October 15, 2009

Here at Icarus, we get a lot of interesting, varied and strategic projects but imagine getting a request from a client to come up with a big picture analysis of the global pharmaceutical market and also the oncology area with no budget for commercially available reports.

This is fun and meaty stuff, and in any case, most of the run of the mill reports are not particularly helpful despite being hundreds of pages long and costing several thousand dollars apiece. They sadly suffer from analysis by paralysis syndrome without offering any real insights.

A lot of the legwork into answering a landscape question like this comes down to common sense. Let's take a look at the US market, which is the largest single region and one of the most profitable, until recently. What's happening there?

Here's a basic snapshot of what we all know:

Increased mergers and acquisitions (with Roche-Genentech, Pfizer-Wyeth, Merck-Schering etc)
Increased focus on cost containment (see the Obama administration stand)
Loss of major blockbuster patents in the next 2 years (too many to mention)
Increase in the number of generic Rx's and hence share of the market
Reduced pipeline success (several drugs have failed spectacularly in phase III recently)
Increased focus on personalised medicine (target the right drug to the right patient)

All of these factors essentially combine to produce a near perfect storm in the US (and EU) markets, with the result of this being:

Increased layoffs
Reduction in the number of sales reps
Hospitals are reducing access to doctors
Reduction in profits as branded Rx share and value declines

However, baby boomers are getting older and retiring, placing an increased focus on:

Chronic health conditions eg hypertension, diabetes, dementia
Cancer (largely a disease of aging)
Cost containment
Health and lifestyle

All of these factors force the pharma companies to regroup and either re-trench as a specialty player in niche markets (eg BMS) or expand more aggressively in emerging markets (eg sanofi-aventis, Pfizer, Novartis, GSK and Merck).

The BRIC countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) are all becoming more industrialised and as the middle class grows, so does demand for quality healthcare. That presents new opportunities for smart companies with resources and infrastructure. These trends are seen across the board, not just in sales and marketing, but also in R&D as companies seek to reduce development costs and speed time to market by going to emerging markets where there is a much larger, untapped pool of newly diagnosed patients available. This is especially true in the oncology market, where even registration trials in various cancers are now being undertaken in China, India, Eastern Europe and the Latam region. An increased focus on partnerships and open science is also beginning to emerge.

All in all, what we are seeing here is slow adaptive change to the external environment, but the trends are already showing clear signs of these shifts, which also mirror the economic change in direction in general.

My suspicion is that the more nimble and diversified a company is, the better they will be able to weather the extended downturn over the next 5-10 years. Change is sometimes a good thing.

6 Comments

Thinkers and Doers in Pharma

By MaverickNY on August 6, 2009

One of the biggest challenges in the Pharma world is meshing strategy with execution in a timely and effective manner.

My experience in big Pharma taught me that the environment is often full of Thinkers, who sit on their 100,000 ft cloud plinking on their harps contemplating ideas, with little regard the practicalities of execution and Doers, who are focused on execution and chopping down trees, without necessarily asking if they are in the right forest or chopping down the right trees.

It's also the classic Global versus Affiliate wars, although not always.

Great teams come together and either have a nice balance between the Thinkers and Doers or have smart people who can do both. When those scenarios plays out, something magical happens and the organisation reaps the benefit of a well organised and well executed strategy that truly makes a difference to both patient outcomes and market performance.

Is it as rare as it seems though?

Sometimes organisations become bogged down in analysis by paralysis or paralysis by analysis. The way forward is to shake things up and bring in decisive leaders who break through the consensus thinking to drive goal driven execution based on real customer insights. They challenge the team to find the nuggets and focus on what's important.

A thoughtful client recently asked me: "What are insights and how can we teach them?"

Taking a look at the Princeton Dictionary we find:

insight – penetration: clear or deep perception of a situation
insight – a feeling of understanding
insight – grasping the inner nature of things intuitively

If we relate this back to Pharma, insights ultimately come from the customer and consumer:

– How do they feel about your brand, their disease, your competitors?

– What do they really want and need?

– How can you help them meet those needs?

Sometimes you may need to be more creative and find new ways of looking at data in order to see things differently, much like the facets of a diamond and how they reflect different patterns in the light. Insights are the same; they help you see what really matters at the heart of something more clearly.

Other times getting out of your dreary corporate office environment can also help. Personally, I used to love impromptu small team meetings in a coffee shop or on the terrace of a hotel overlooking a golf course. Being out and about in a more relaxed environment seems to shake out the cobwebs and get people chatting more informally about the topic and issues at hand. Several heads are always better than one for such a think tank session.

Perhaps also it is the lack of Powerpoint replaced by sketches on napkins or scraps of paper that brings out the childhood creativity in people to simply be free that makes the difference sometimes. Certainly, I've seen more creative and effective ideas come out of those loose relaxed meetings when someone said a seemingly isolated and random thought that focused and stimulated the team on a whole new idea.

That's insight right there – often buried deep inside us and all we need to do is find ways of letting them bubble up or the key to unlocking them. The challenge is to close off the left brain logical control and let the right brain loose on concepts, creativity and connections between the team members.

Those A-ha! moments are priceless.

Ultimately, social media is more about right brain thinking than left brain logic. It's about communication, empathy, interaction and engagement, all things that make logical, scientific-driven Pharma extremely uncomfortable. The key to achieving balance is to use both sides of the brain to create a whole brain strategy.

What does this mean?

Well, it is possible to use the left brain analytical side to evaluate and monitor your market or competitors for useful data driven intelligence to enable the team to develop actionable insights. Then utilise the right brain to create new ways of engaging and interacting with doctors and patients that improve the all round experience for all concerned.

It doesn't have to be scary if you Think and Do, but in the long run the Pharma companies that crack this dilemma will be bold winners in the race to superior customer engagement. The losers will still be focused on dying out traditional methods of selling in a brave new conceptual and digital age.

Do you want to be a winner or loser?

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Tracking brand activity in Pharma – the impact of the Onglyza approval

By MaverickNY on August 3, 2009

This morning I checked into my database intending to search for some information on lung cancer relating to the SATURN data in maintenance therapy that is being updated at the World Lung Congress in San Francisco.

Instead, the first dozen items were on the FDA approval of Onglyza (saxagliptin). Oooh. It seems that the FDA just approved BMS/AZ's joint development in diabetes, talk about a wealth of signalling data all at once. This product is a me-too, very similar to Merck's Januvia, a billion dollar therapy already on the market. On checking my emails and Twitter alerts, there was a bunch of information pertaining to Onglyza, Januvia and also Lantus (insulin glargine), sanofi-aventis' novel insulin product recently in the news for potential (but not proven) cancer adverse events.

The amusing thing is that sometimes you forget that you even set these alerts up, but they are very handy when major news or events in the market happen and you have a nice set of warnings and data with which to make a handy assessment of what's going on without having to search for it.

Even better, 5 mins later a frantic client called asking,

"Help, I'm travelling and need to know the price of Onglyza! You wouldn't happen to know it would you, please?"

It took all of 10 seconds to find the intelligence they were looking for in the database – price parity with Merck's Januvia at an average wholesale price of $5.72 per pill for both the 2.5 and 5 mg doses, which seemed to surprise them. Novartis also have a similar DPP-4 therapy on the market, Galvus, although it not yet approved in the US.

This market segment is now set for some very serious competition between some heavyweight players, especially as many of the older therapies cause weight gain or do not control blood sugar levels optimally. Merck's product has done reasonably well, but a wake up call has happened and it will be interesting to see how they respond to competition.

What I'm wondering though, is what patients switching to Onglyza or receiving the therapy de novo will be posting via blogs and social media over the next few months. It would be an interesting exercise to track if anyone is interested, because these sentiments may help redefine messaging and positioning of the brand against the competition and vice versa for other existing diabetes therapies. The neat thing is that some web2.0 tools can even enable you to do this in real time.

Signalling in Pharma – what is it?

By MaverickNY on July 31, 2009

Recently, I was talking with a Pharma client about signalling (or signaling as our American cousins call it) and how it can be extremely useful for marketing strategy purposes.

We are all signalling our intent, ideas and thoughts everyday in our daily lives, but imagine if you can aggregate information about a company or brands strategic intent around future business events? This might take the form of numerous sources including press releases, analyst presentations, discussions with company employees or physicians involved with clinical studies, news articles, RSS feeds, web2.0 tools, online search, social media monitoring etc.

In fact, you could look at the building of a picture about brand X or topic Y in a simple hub and spoke fashion like this:

Now imagine monitoring those sources over time and clearer, focused, sharper picture emerges about the strategic intent of the competition and if you're aware of this intelligence, you can use it to your advantage by pre-empting defensive or offensive strategies as appropriate.

Of course, it gets even more fun when you factor in multiple products and companies around a particular topic or disease, with numerous hub and spokes and different sizes of systems depending upon how much information is available or collected and this simplified without intertwined links, which can make the whole picture more akin to solving an evil sudoku puzzle:

The beauty of seeing the big picture is that out of the chaos emerges patterns and trends that can be very useful to a marketing team wondering what to do next. Playmaking and strategy aren't limited to NFL teams, but the smart Pharma marketers can use intelligence and customer driven data insights wisely to better position their brand either now or in the future.

We get a to spend a lot of time on these activities as consultants and thus over time we also get to see general disease area or industry trends emerging ahead of the mainstream. Ultimately, helping our clients stay one step ahead of the competition can be a very interesting and fun experience indeed.

Managing the news and information in Pharma

By MaverickNY on July 27, 2009

Someone raised an interesting question at a conference hosted by the Business Development Institute (#BDI) that I went to last week. They asked how anyone could possibly keep up with all the Pharma news and information, never mind follow thousands of people and interact via social media?

The answer is I don't.

Obviously, we all dip in and snack sometimes, but for me, most of the time I aggregate my information sources and use it for intelligence purposes on demand, ie search.

It's faster, more user-friendly and ultimately, faster.

It also means I'm a lot more efficient and less overwhelmed this way. Just in the same way people find information on this blog through Google searches, I can do the same thing with my personalised Pharma database. If a drug is in the news for not being approved by the European CHMP in indication X, then I can search for relevant information in the database, as appropriate. Certainly, I don't have time (or the inclination) to read lots of news articles on the topic every day or my brain would simply fry with information overload.

What is interesting is that once you have a database then there is the ability to see and detect strategic trends more clearly, rather than isolated individual items or snippets of data. The more data you have, the more useful those pictures of the trends in real time will be.

None of us can truly predict the future, but getting some sense of change before everyone else is often very useful business intelligence that can give you or your client a competitive advantage if you can grasp the broader landscape better and faster than anyone else.

These days, I see a big craving by senior Pharma executives for better intelligence and smarter strategic decision making based on data and deeper expertise, rather than a growing shopping list of uncoordinated tactics.

3 Comments

Social media monitoring and Pharma

By MaverickNY on July 17, 2009

For all those companies wondering whether to dip their toes in the water with social media or not, this fun presentation provides some interesting stats and snippets that illustrate some useful pointers.

Well, it is summer Friday, right?

What the F**K is Social Media: One Year Later

View more documents from Marta Kagan.

The evils of audio translation and it's relation to Pharma

By MaverickNY on June 30, 2009

Image via CrunchBase

One of the big challenges with the Web2.0 world is as more services provide audio through YouTube and other tools, the ability to transcribe and translate into the written word has yet to catch up with reality. We've all experienced the vagaries of Google Translate on websites, but what about audio files?

A while back, I enthusiastically tried out some apps available on my iPhone with the idea of testing them out for authenticity and accuracy for business purposes. These included ReQall and Jott. Now, even bearing in mind I have a British, not American accent, it was a bit of a surprise to be reading a translated shopping list and finding I needed an item hilariously called "break your knees" and other such gibberish. Sadly, I was at the checkout before realising that it actually meant 'frozen garden peas'!

It was therefore with great amusement that I read an interesting article in the New York Times this morning about Google Voice. Here is one such snippet:

"Sunday schnitzels cripples"? Yikes, I'm glad my accent isn't the only one that gets mangled by the computer algorithms!!

A few years ago, we used to send CD's of physician interviews off for medical translation and of course, they would come back with some absolute gems and pearls, necessitating having to listen to the whole thing again to tune up the quirks and strangulated medical terminology. After a while, we began to think maybe it was easier to do it ourselves, at least it would be accurate, if time consuming.

Having just signed up for Google Voice, it will be interesting to see how good the service really is, but raising ones hopes too much is probably not a good idea after reading the hilarity of the examples in the Times article.

How many of us have started to get those small Flip video cameras for posting content to the audio web via YouTube, Qik, UStream, Viddler, Vimeo etc? At $200 a pop for a point and shoot, the costs are now so low that a major barrier has been removed for the masses to take advantage of new technology without needing a Ph.D to figure out the weighty and complicated manuals.

Recently, Fred Wilson of A VC described how the API could be used to get a written translation of a half hour long interview from a YouTube video. Most of us can scan text and mine it for key points relevant to us much more quickly than listening to an audio presentation without written cues.

Many of us listen to Pharma and Biotechnology analyst presentations regularly,
but again, these are time consuming and there is many a time when I
would rather download the presentation and a transcript for easy
offline review while on a train or plane than having to sit through a
live or recorded webcast for an hour at an inconvenient time, and of course, you don't where or when the relevant
items of interest will pop up, forcing you to sit through the whole thing to get a small nugget of intelligence that might actually be valuable.

Still, in the Pharma world, imagine if you could accurately translate audio from the web, which included patient sentiments about brands, diseases or even companies? That would be very powerful indeed, especially with
significant growth in online communication expected to come from video over the next few years. Being able to analyse the ideas expressed in the aggregate would be a really useful tool for social media monitoring.

Watch this space for further developments in the near future.

4 Comments

Useful iPhone medical apps

By MaverickNY on May 21, 2009

This post was stimulated by Martin Fenner, a clinical fellow in oncology in Hannover, Germany. We 'met' in The LifeScientists room on Friendfeed and on Nature Networks. He won a competition for a free iPhone app, specifically the Clinical Trials app but unfortunately couldn't use it in Germany as it is US-only. His loss turned out to be my big gain because I use the NIH website a lot in my daily job but would never have paid $25 for it. Last night I decided to test drive it and also look more closely at a couple of other medical apps I use. In this blog post, I'll review the clinical trial app and review the others in subsequent posts.

Clinical Trials on the iPhone Home Page:

All new apps start off on my first Home page and get moved pretty quickly if not used regularly. I have a feeling that this app is definitely one for keeps on the coveted Home page.

To start off, you get an easier to use menu driven database, which is intuitive and obvious:

My only beef with the search page is that while you can sort by location etc, you can't sort by therapeutic intervention, as per the advanced search on the web page where there is a list you can click and choose from. This is a major omission because different drugs might be entered by codename, generic or brand name. The app forces you to type in the drug in the generic search box and take a chance. It is more designed for patients this way who might be looking for trials in a particular cancer type, so it is probably a niche grumble, although my guess is that many Pharma people would also search the same way.

Yesterday, I was interested in Bcl-2 type drugs, and specifically, Mcl-1 targeted therapies. Thus I typed in Bcl-2 to see what it would produce:

Ok, it returns a general list of trials involving Bcl-2 therapies that you can scroll through and review. The titles are important – they tell you a lot about the trial. The little note underneath each entry is also useful, explaining the intervention, condition tested and the status of that trial.

Scrolling through, I found this interesting page:

Now, I happen to know that Obatoclax is both a Bcl-2 and Mcl-1 inhibitor and was specifically interested in whether there were any trials in malignant melanoma after reading yesterday that Mcl-1 may be an important target in that disease. Interestingly, I found some trials in hematologic malignancies but not melanoma. That was useful to know.

Suppose one is interested in a particular trial, what then? Well, clicking on one of the above selections gives more details about the trial itself like this:

What's useful is that you can email the trial page to anyone, including yourself for later browsing. Also, if you were doing competitive intelligence on mantle cell lymphoma, this sort of granular information is vital if trials are just opened or recruiting. Knowing when recruiting or the study has finished is also helpful in anticipation of the results and the impact on other therapies and competitors in that market space.

Overall Analysis:

I use the full NIH website ClinicalTrials.gov all the time, but often wish for easier access on the road or while visiting clients. This handy little app will help considerably, especially as it is quick and easy to use. The only downside will be searching a big tumour type such as breast or lung cancer and getting hundreds of entries but as an adjunct for finding specific competitor information, I think it will be useful and definitely a keeper in my app library. Would I pay the hefty $25 price tag? I don't know, it's too early to tell, but I sure am very pleased with my freebie copy courtesy of Martin 🙂

7 Comments

Using competitive intelligence to drive business

By MaverickNY on April 25, 2009

This blog post is inspired by the enigmatic Eric Garland, who gave a superb presentation at the recent annual SCIP meeting in Chicago. Sadly, I missed the event due to business commitments, but he kindly shared the deck as you can see below:

Keep It Positive: Using Competitive Intelligence to Enhance Business Development

View more presentations from Eric Garland.

I'd like to take a couple of general points he raised and relate them to the Pharma and Biotech. First of all, Eric stated:

"For competitive intelligence to survive it must blend with psychological reality and focus on business development, not just Cold War 'enemy tracking'."

This is so true. CI is not an academic exercise and most marketing folks are usually intuitively on top of what what's going on in their market. There is nothing worse than spending five or six figures of precious budget only to be told what you already knew. Monitoring studies are on their way out. But that's the big white elephant in the room that many CI people are slow to catch on; companies can no longer afford to spend over $1M in salary and benefits to indulge a group mere academic confirmatory studies. Thus, we find they may well be a dying breed.

The smart companies are thinking differently.

They're integrating CI, landscape assessments, KOL research and highly technical analyses in one project via the market research or marketing departments that helps them understand the bigger strategic issues to enable smarter decision making. We've started seeing more of these complex RFP's coming through lately and they make my heart sing. Why? Because they excite us – it's a chance to work in partnership with the cross functional team and really make a difference – either through identifying suitable licensing candidates that may make a real difference to patients lives or through creatively finding new ways to increase brand revenues. That's where you add significant value to an organisation.

The other idea I liked from Eric's presentation was this chart about how the future of intelligence might look:

The top ideas for the next 1-5 years are already happening now in technical fields such as oncology, hematology, immunology and HIV, as are technological revolutions. As more and more smarter targeted agents are hitting the cancer market, the role of biomarkers, histology and gene mutations are increasingly affecting how patients might be segmented and treated. Technolical advances in cancer research at the molecular level is quite frankly astonishing, although there is still a huge body of research yet to be done.

Gone are the days when new drugs came out and everyone got blindly treated with them, irrespective of whether they could predict whether they would actually work or not. Now you have to understand the science and biology of the disease as well, which is no bad thing. The Obama Stimulus Plan will help in this regard,

With higher priced drugs hitting the market, you'd better have a sensible rationale for WHY, WHERE and WHO your drug might actually be suitable for. The massive block of older baby boomers will soon to be eligible for Medicare coverage, the cost of therapies in the OECD and developing world are rapidly increasing. Major decisions need to be made on rational treatment and reimbursement or the global health care system will be as broke as the banking system. Another bubble could soon be in the making, only this time it's Pharma getting greedy, with inevitable predictable consequences.

Going back to competitive intelligence, how does this all hang together? Well, the smarter companies are using CI to inform business decisions, integrating it with marketing and business develepment/licensing, analysing markets to address health and lifestyle issues and driving the future portfolios for real growth. The slow companies are still out in left field, focused inwardly on 'competitors' and what they're doing. It's no longer good enough to be 24th to market with yet another me-too similar drug.

Innovation, integration and thinking differently will be the keys to success as the baby boomers become seniors in the next few years. That takes boldness and creativity to think outside of the box; it is also a very long and lonely road, but thank goodness there are some enlightened companies out there treading that path rather than be stuck in left field doing the same old, same old.

3 Comments

Competitive intelligence is crucial – or is it?

By MaverickNY on April 17, 2009

Image by radiospike photography via Flickr

I'm busy doing a couple of useful little competitive intelligence projects at the moment and it always strikes me how some companies actively use it well in a proactive fashion, while others resent paying any money on what they see as a pointless exercise.

It doesn't really matter how you go about gathering the information, after all this could be focused internet research, telephone interviews, face to face meetings, social media monitoring etc, the important thing is how valuable is the intelligence that was gleaned? After all, if you don’t have the information, imagine how valuable it would be to your competitors?

Intelligence is really another form of gathering customer insights that add value to your business. Used well and judiciously, it will actually save you money in the long run and save you a lot of pain in very competitive market places.

Oncology, for example, is becoming increasingly very competitive in some tumour types as more targeted therapies enter the market and many others are competing for patients in clinical trials. This will inevitably lead to winners and losers. Being ahead of the game means a smarter strategy and often faster, smarter execution.

What about big markets with many treatment options such as depression? Being 20th to market means that you are either going to have to be significantly better than the competition, a game changing breakthrough if you like, or smarter in your approach by using more granular patient segmentation and competitive intelligence to better differentiate your product. There are thankfully new methods of achieving this now, but it means marketing and market research directors need to think outside the box and do things differently. That makes them uncomfortable. They start focusing on the potential negatives and noise, rather than how the tools can help them make better decisions.

Innovation is scary sometimes, but the rewards in terms of smarter and more timely intelligence can far outweigh stepping outside ones comfort zone.

Do you want to boldly define your market or have the market define your brand for you?

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