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Paul specializes in the design and execution of bespoke competitive intelligence (CI) projects and serves as a thought partner for biotechs and large pharma organizations.
In this series, Evaluate’s consulting team discuss some of the key challenges that face the companies that they work with across the pharma space. Learn more about how Paul D’Souza-Bento, Senior Consultant, Evaluate Consulting & Analytics, works with pharma companies to help them monitor and navigate their ever-changing competitive landscape and adapt their strategies to deliver growth.
Market monitoring is essentially long-term opportunity and threat assessment. We support clients at the brand, pipeline, and franchise levels, to help them navigate risks, opportunities, and barriers within specific disease areas they compete in. This involves tracking key events, like competitor trial activity, regulatory filings, and approvals, primarily at the disease level but also more broadly at the macro level (regulatory, pricing, market access). Our goal is to provide clarity on what to expect and to inform decision-making around assets or brands.
Companies need to know where they stand with their assets, candidates, or brands across clinical, regulatory and commercial parameters. For marketed treatments, it’s crucial to understand the landscape and any current or emerging competitive threats to their market share and revenue. This insight helps inform strategic decisions. Do they need to look at new markets? How can they better differentiate themselves from other drugs coming down the pipeline? How do they strengthen their label? How should they plan for lifecycle management? Ultimately, it’s about maintaining a competitive edge and avoiding being overtaken or losing market share. For pipeline assets, it is about how to meet the unmet need. How can you provide patients with a better, more differentiated option?
Challenges vary usually by company size but ultimately, long-term landscape monitoring is complex, resource-intensive and time consuming, which is a tough combination. Often, small biotechs lack dedicated CI resources, so it’s hard to set up efficient monitoring programs. In large pharma, while CI is more highly regarded and well-resourced, CI teams are often stretched across multiple disease areas which again leads to resource constraints. In both cases, external support can help to mitigate against this. When we work with clients on CI monitoring, we do a lot of legwork but more importantly, we serve as a thought partner, providing an external, unbiased perspective of the impact of market and competitor events on their drug.
We start by aligning with clients on their business objectives and priorities. Are they focused on protecting market share for a marketed drug? Do they want to be first-in-class for a new therapy? Then we design the CI program to meet their needs, including alignment on competitor/market scop (e.g. geographies, phase, drug class, key competitors and assets etc),. Next, we conduct research around the disease in questions to get a baseline understanding of the competitive landscape and key market factors driving the space. We then use the scoping details to set up a robust monitoring system using our internal proprietary platforms, including Citeline’s Pharmaprojects, Trialtrove and Evaluate Pharma, and supplemented with alerts and RSS feeds from secondary news, company material, broker/analyst reports etc. Using the market monitoring system, we are able to track key insights and summarize – along with implications – to our clients in the form of alerts, newsletters, and monthly or quarterly reports.
As a consulting team, we’re able to tap into both Evaluate and Citeline’s proprietary platforms and databases, which means we have comprehensive coverage of multiple disease landscapes at the clinical, trial, drug, regulatory and commercial level. This provides a comprehensive, integrated view that really can’t be matched. It means we’re able to quickly establish baseline landscapes, benchmark data readouts, and anticipate regulatory timelines so we can give clients actionable insights in one convenient package. It’s a pretty powerful combination!
The variety is fascinating. I get to work across multiple disease areas and learn new spaces, which is both challenging and rewarding. There’s a misconception that CI is just monitoring but it’s much more; Here at Evaluate we’re strategic thought partners, providing analysis and recommendations that help clients differentiate their products and navigate complex, competitive markets. Companies who work with our CI consulting team are able to tap into a wide spectrum of resources, from market monitoring to strategic workshops and competitor simulations, and we make sure that we’re adding value at every stage.
Evaluate’s custom analytics team help you to address unique commercial challenges. We answer key asset, portfolio, and corporate strategy-related questions, powered by the combined resources of Norstella. With access to extensive data assets and experience across therapy areas and modalities, we partner with you to provide the answers you need to drive success.
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