Published
Share:
Pengfei joined the Consulting & Analytics team in 2021 and has over 10 years of experience in the pharmaceutical industry. His focus areas include competitive intelligence, clinical, asset and portfolio strategy, business development and licensing, and real-world data.
In this series, the consulting teams at Citeline and Evaluate discuss some of the key challenges that face the companies they work with across the pharma space. Learn more about how Pengfei Lu, Senior Manager, Consulting & Analytics, provides forecasting data to help pharma and biotech companies to size up the marketplace.
Throughout the lifecycle of a drug from development to the commercial stage after launch, market sizing informs the decision maker how well an asset is going to perform. It also can be used by different stakeholders within a company, by either people doing research and development or those on a commercial team. And the senior management as well, when they assess different opportunities and they want to look at the numbers, and also for investors who want to invest or provide funding to a biotech for an asset. That’s also something they can refer to. Additionally, for business development looking to in-license or out-license, they need to have tangible data to rely on.
One example is if a company wants to have a “go” or “no go” decision on an Investigational New Drug (IND) application. They have a lot of preclinical assets, and many of them look quite promising from the science, but no company can take everything forward. One thing is to do a forecast so they can look at the revenue and the NPV, and then maybe a few assets in different disease areas. Then, they can see which one can give them the best return, and they can decide “go” or “no go” for bringing the asset to a clinical stage.
We can do a forecast as well for a later stage so they can decide when to make a decision on which asset to take forward based on how good it looks. The science is important, but at the same time you want to look at commercially how attractive it may be.
Also, for licensing or partnering, you want to look at the numbers. Say somebody wants to in-license, they will have a figure provided by their potential partner, but they want somebody neutral, a third party, to do an assessment for them. That can help them better assess the opportunities. Strategically that’s an important decision for the company because you’re talking about deals worth multimillions if not billions.
Also, say a company in China or Japan has a product approved in their own country and they want to expand it to other markets such as the US or Europe, but they’re not sure whether they stand a chance there. They can do the forecast for those markets they’re interested in and see which market they should go for and what the return may look like.
For these types of forecasts, we widely use patient flow methodology. We usually start from the epidemiology — for example, the incidence of a cancer. From that incidence, we estimate how many patients will use that class of drug. And within that drug class, we determine which assets of interest are going to take up that market share. And then from there times the price, and then you’ll get the revenue in simple terms.
I think one of our strengths is our data. We have Datamonitor Healthcare (DMHC) and platforms like Evaluate Epi with strong epidemiological data and a strong epidemiology team. That’s the bottom-up approach that we mostly use nowadays, so that’s the very first step — we need epi as the starting point. In DMHC, we have very good epidemiological data and can forecast it well into the next decade or so, 2035 or 2040. We also have epidemiological data from Evaluate. Then, we have a lot of the historical sales data from Evaluate Pharma we can also factor into our analysis and forecast.
Apart from the data, another strength we have is primary research. We’ll talk to the key opinion leaders (KOLs) or payers to really understand things like what are unmet needs in the disease and how the drug in question is going to address some of those unmet needs. We get some good feedback from KOLs about how likely or how much of the drug they’re going to prescribe or whether they like it or not. What are the strengths, what are the weaknesses? If it’s launched, how likely they are to prescribe it and how many of their patients will use those drugs?
So, it’s not just coming out with the figures but also insightful, more qualitative analysis that we will provide alongside our focus forecast. I think all that serves enables us to provide really valuable insights to clients.
It varies. Helping them select their pipeline, which products to bring to IND and into clinical development, would be an important impact. Often, they can rely on the insight we provide them and say, yes, clearly this one isn’t really going to work. Even if the science looks great, the data looks great, it’s not going to be impactful in the long term commercially or after it’s launched.
Another impact is in lifecycle management. So far, a drug has been approved for a certain indication, but in lifecycle management, they decide whether it will be worthwhile to expand it to another indication. It’s not like they can just file for that. They need to have investment in trials and so forth. They need to know whether they would have the return.
The Citeline and Evaluate Consulting & Analytics teams offers bespoke strategic solutions derived from their industry-leading products, along with the combined resources of parent company Norstella. These insights are curated by a global team of industry experts to address unique commercial challenges and help deliver life-saving treatments to patients faster.
Get in touch with our team to explore the right solutions for your business.
