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Markella brings 20 years of industry and consulting experience with deep expertise in competitive intelligence (CI). She specializes in oncology / hematology as well as rare diseases. Markella has been delivering intelligence and actionable insights to client teams since 2007 and has been leading long term CI engagements since 2017.
In this series, Evaluate consulting team members discuss some of the key challenges that face the companies they work with across the pharma space. Learn more about how Markella Kordoyanni, Director, Consulting & Analytics, gives clients a market advantage via competitive intelligence.
CI and understanding the competition have always been part of companies’ and senior management’s objectives. It’s an effort to contextualize the work that they’re doing for patients, understanding how they can differentiate their drug against what’s currently available, and learning who else is working with the same objectives in mind.
Certainly there’s a big shift in a lot of big brand names and drugs going off patent. So that’s definitely in the forefront right now.
Now, and in recent years with all the data accumulation happening, companies want and need to make more sense of their competition.
There’s more of a sense of urgency because data are available to us faster than in the past – and the speed of its creation has been accelerating for a decade. We’ve entered a new era, if you will, of making sense of all the data, including intelligence data. It’s all happening right in front of our eyes.
With AI now at the forefront of things, it’s really changing how companies and the pharmaceutical industry view the competitive landscape.
Big pharma has had teams dedicated to CI historically, but even the internal teams need external support when it comes to competitive intelligence. They need either a sounding board or need to feed information back to senior management and stakeholders across the organization, which is very hard to manage internally. So it’s very typical these days to have external support for these types of engagements.
In a very practical way, CI is relevant across functions in any pharma or even any biotech, because whether you are the brand manager of a new drug that’s launching, or whether you’re in clinical operations and you’re thinking of your trial design, you still need to answer questions about the company’s asset, your trial design in the context of what else is happening in the market and who else is working in the same space trying to address the similar patient need. So, CI is relevant across all functions of a company.
The way CI is addressed across different organizations is different. Biotechs typically have a lot fewer resources. They don’t typically have a dedicated group for CI, so they often seek external expertise to support them. This is why Evaluate’s CI team is so often in demand!
A company might have an asset that trials data supports launching in more than one indication. And so one business challenge could be prioritizing: Where do we launch first so that we make the most impact? Let’s say if there are two indications in question, CI can help the company understand how crowded the competitive landscape is and how well that drug can differentiate against other competitors in this space.
Maybe it’s more for big pharma than biotechs, but another business challenge is for the pharma company to understand more about itself. It’s all about growth. How do we position ourselves in the pharma market? How do we make a difference for patients? How are we perceived by physicians who prescribe our products? A lot of times, CI helps the pharma company understand how it is perceived in the market, how they stack up against others. And that will help them define their strategy for the next two years, five years, 10 years. They have a vision in mind, but they want to make sure their vision translates in the real world — that the physicians and the patients are using their products echo or mirror that image, if you will.
Another business challenge is making sure the company is not myopic. It’s not too focused on what it’s doing but views it in the broader context. Are we doing well, or as well as we think, or as well as we set out to be?
We use a data-first approach, but that’s not where we stop. We help our clients understand: What does the data mean? Why is some data more impactful than other data and what should they do with it? It has to be the insights, not just the data. Everyone sees a lot of data these days. Competitive intelligence is not really intelligence if it’s just data. Part of our CI outputs goes beyond just the data and looks at the implications for the client, contextualizing the data within the business objectives of every project. It’s going beyond the data.
It’s the actionable insight. Here’s your competitive environment. You have competitor X coming behind you very fast. You have competitor Y who is differentiating on this attribute that you thought you were going to be first, and for that reason, we recommend that you do X. It’s typically a much multifaceted recommendation because just by doing one thing doesn’t necessarily solve the problem of differentiating your drug. So there are multiple facets of a solution.
We are working on a clinical trial, funded by the US Department of Defense (DOD), that we are supporting through ClinicalTrials.gov. It’s in post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD. And it’s an exciting platform where the DOD is testing different types of drugs for PTSD. We are advising them on the drugs most relevant to test in PTSD. We have the clinical data to support that final decision of what drug passes and what doesn’t before it actually gets tested on the military.
The project started with us looking through hundreds, if not thousands of drugs and doing a pipeline review to help the DOD narrow down a long list of potential drug candidates to test in their clinical trial. We spent a lot of time curating secondary data through Trialtrove.
The second phase was to narrow down that long list to a short list of drug candidates, and then select four or five. So we’ve done three cycles of that process and went from 10 drugs down to five, down to four and selected one, then repeated the process. So we are now on our fourth. We have selected four drugs actively being tested in the trial as of now, and we’re about to go through another round of pipeline review, as we call it, to add another one. So it’s a cyclical project where we add drugs to the trial and we create new cohorts.
There are other aspects of analysis we are providing, whether it’s identifying right sites or doing deep dives into specific drugs to ensure their molecular profile fits the project objectives.
We’re working with colonels and high-level military trained psychiatrists who have been on the battlefield. It’s kind of humbling in a way to be in a room with these experts. And there are also very renowned psychiatrists that have been doing PTSD research for 20, 30 years. You also have a regulatory team guiding the DOD on how to do all the regulatory pieces required for the FDA.
And there are the sponsors, the companies providing these drugs. There are academic institutions interested in participating. There are biotechs and pharmas. There are a lot of ups and downs and roller coasters throughout the process.
The end result is to find the right treatments for PTSD for active military and veterans, and then eventually outside the military world for civilians.
When it comes down to the actual work, it’s still very much familiar to us — mining a lot of data, making sense of the data, and providing insights and analysis for our clients. With a government client, there is probably 50 times the administrative red tape compared to typical private pharma company or a biotech company. Where our typical contracts would take anywhere between one to one and a half, maybe two months at most, from scoping to writing the proposal to pitching, to closing the deal, this most recent contract took nine months to close.
There are a lot of guidelines and protocols that you have to follow as part of working with the government. But it is very interesting to hear from the DOD about the administration. And as administrations change, it’s interesting to see the shifts in what’s important, what’s not important.
It depends on your client, but not everybody lets you in on their strategic objectives. Some clients are a lot more open about sharing their vision, their company strategy. If it’s not a public company, that makes things a little harder. That’s where you can find clients are a little bit more reserved. They don’t necessarily give you all the context you need to understand or to help you translate what a specific event’s impact is on their business.
If you lack that context, then you have to make a lot of assumptions to understand or recommend the level of impact for them. We always invite feedback. For that very reason, CI projects are very iterative. We report out events on a sometimes daily, weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis.
Internal company biases present another challenge. The in-house CI team has specific assumptions, and they also have internal clients they report to, whether it’s the CEO of the company or the brand managers. And everyone is bringing their own biases or their own perspectives on how competitive company X is compared to them. So there’s that inherent bias where somebody might think their asset is a lot better than it actually is, or where competitor X should be dismissed when we actually think the opposite. That’s where the data help us make a case and bring an objective perspective.
It’s always changing. It’s always a challenge to come up to speed with a new indication. CI projects can have a huge breadth of scope at times. So the challenge is to be able to narrow down the scope a little bit and give the client the most meaningful part. Part of our job is to guide and give them the most impactful news, the most impactful events, and help them navigate through all the noise. That’s a challenge, but it always makes things interesting for me.
I really like working in this type of organization where there are so many different groups. I think we have an incredible group of talent within the consulting and analytics group. And we also are lucky that we have other colleagues that can help us from time to time, whether it’s the analyst teams from Datamonitor Healthcare or our Biomedtracker colleagues or our MMIT colleagues when we need help with primary market research. So as part of Norstella, we have exposure to other expert teams. For me, that makes my job easier and even more interesting.
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