Navigating the rocky path to commercial success for biopharma launches

Biopharma organizations and emerging biotechs must contend with a market in constant flux on their journey to product commercialization. From regulatory hurdles to pricing pressures and unique patient engagement needs, there are many obstacles to overcome to achieve commercial success.

In this blog, Mike Stout, President, US Commercial at Inizio Engage, explores the importance of having a strategic partner to provide support across these areas and strengthen the journey to commercialization.

Challenges facing biopharma organizations

Biopharma and emerging biotech companies are inherently innovative, agile, and resourceful, but they must remain reactive to a wide range of challenges when bringing their treatments to patients. These include:

Incoming regulations

Focus from regulators directly impacts everything from process development to pricing. On top of the myriad existing regulations, new mandates are regularly introduced. The Inflation Reduction Act is an example, set to put additional pressure on leading pharmaceutical and biotech brands across the US. Coming into full force in 2025, the law introduces measures to prevent increases in drug prices from surpassing inflation. To minimize the impact of these measures, biotechs need to find ways to deploy their resources in the most strategic ways possible.

Pricing pressures

Pricing pressures and market access challenges will continue to impact biopharma and biotechs, too. With complex treatments such as cell and gene therapies gaining more traction in recent years, understanding their complexities in terms of value, pricing, and access is crucial. Payers and manufacturers may lack evidence to support curative claims during pricing and access negotiations for many emerging innovations. This requires many organizations to seek out strategic partners to navigate and overcome these issues.

Strengthening patient engagement

Biopharma and biotech companies also need to look ahead to the crucial patient engagement element of their therapy development. This means educating healthcare professionals (HCPs), patients and their families on how to take therapeutics correctly and ensure adherence and compliance. Organizations need support in delivering this crucial information effectively across the entire patient journey, from diagnosis through to completion of treatment.

Navigating the uncharted waters of rare disease treatment

Companies are increasingly orienting their pipelines in rare diseases and oncology treatments, seeing it as a sweet spot between patient needs and commercial opportunities. However, bringing treatments for rare and orphan diseases to patients has additional obstacles, and there is no established playbook to follow for drug developers in this space.

Biosimilars of growing interest due to patent cliffs

As the interest in novel treatments grows, biosimilars are also becoming increasingly popular, and companies are investing in them to capture a share of the highly lucrative market. As a result, these companies must seek guidance to effectively and strategically deploy their resources in this area.

Embracing new innovations

Fortunately, there is a wide range of innovations emerging that are set to change the way biopharma and biotechs navigate these complexities, including:

Harnessing AI to build talented teams

Recent advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) are having a profound impact across many industries, and the health and life sciences industry is no exception.
One key issue companies face is attracting and retaining talent, with many roles taking months to fill. AI has the potential to identify suitable candidates for a wide variety of roles across the industry, from HCPs to biotech sales representatives. By analyzing databases of potential candidates across multiple platforms and updating to any changes in real time, AI has the ability to help recruiters make informed, up-to-date hiring decisions to get the right professionals in the right roles, at the right time.

Embracing an omnichannel approach

As approaches to treatment become increasingly personalized, so must the way companies communicate with HCPs who offer them to patients.

This is where an omnichannel approach comes in. When combining talented people with the latest technology, and utilizing a variety of digital platforms, an innovative and strategic solution provider can deliver more personalized and impactful experiences to HCPs. By underpinning agile marketing approaches with modern data, analytics, and technology infrastructures, companies can ensure that their campaigns resonate with key audiences and initiate the awareness and adoption curve that will best position their brand for commercial success.

Working with a multi-specialized partner

By embracing the support of a specialized partner, biopharma and biotechs can harness the latest technological advances along with expert insights to overcome the obstacles they face on their commercial journey.

Inizio provides commercial expertise through Inizio Engage and its other business units to combine a suite of strategic experts and cutting-edge technologies underpinned by data analytics. These capabilities are designed to optimize the journey to commercialization across every step, from Phase II through to post-launch, providing strategic guidance across scalable technology platforms and data architecture to facilitate collaborative processes and enhance agility.

Ready to strengthen your commercial journey with a data-led approach? Let’s talk: https://inizio.health/contact/