Long and costly product development cycles make it essential for pharmaceutical companies to maximize limited staff and resources to the development of compounds with the greatest potential market value. From the time a company’s R&D (Research and Development) group begins to develop a new prescription medicine until it receives FDA approval to market the drug in the United States, a drug company typically spends $1 billion over the course of 10 to 15 years.
Leading companies are integrating commercial insights earlier and earlier into the new product process in an effort to identify and target promising compounds, reduce development cycle time, focus resources for greatest impact and increase their potential for launching a blockbuster drug.
Early-Stage Commercialization activities range from therapeutic opportunity and competitive landscape assessments to thought-leader focus groups, initial pricing studies, and pre-efficacy forecasts during pre-clinical and Phases I and II development. Global pharmaceutical companies must find ways to improve early-stage decision making and enhance product design using commercial insights to gain an overall competitive advantage in the marketplace.
Best Practices, LLC conducted research for this report to identify winning strategies, structures, and best practices in early-stage product commercialization and portfolio management. Best Practices also sought to clarify and codify Global Product Strategy’s placement in the corporate organizational chart to determine a best fit for the organization to provide optimal support.
Through this report, executives at leading biopharmaceutical companies shared reasons why the work done through early commercialization groups is invaluable. The participants cited the following areas where Early-Stage Commercialization efforts benefit overall corporate success:
- Optimizing the value of assets
- Driving alignment of product development with unmet patient needs
- Identifying commercial viability of drug candidates and helping to redirect funding from projects with lower potential to those with higher potential for success
- Focusing all parties on areas expected to have the greatest return on investment
- Enabling project prioritization
- Facilitating collaboration between commercial and clinical development staff
- Informing internal and external investment decisions
- Continuously monitoring and communicating changes in the market that affect product potential
- Paving the way for successful product launch