How Accelerated Drug Development Requires Disruption in Market Access and Pricing

Global Pricing Innovations (GPI) is a price and access insights company that uses analytical approaches to provide data-driven, evidence-based support and helps clients make better investment decisions in the biopharmaceutical industry. GPI has a team of domain experts who provide high quality, curated, and rapid insights to help clients with their global pricing strategy, market access optimization, and asset evaluation. We recently sat down with Preeti Patel, MPharm, CEO and Founder of GPI, to learn what is driving the growing importance for early stage asset value and price forecasting, how GPI are supporting clients through these challenges, and how this solution was developed.

There is a growing importance for early stage asset value and price forecasting. What is driving the need and how are GPI helping?

The landscape is moving faster than ever before; new drug research and development has accelerated post-COVID. With these accelerated regulatory routes available, drugs are coming onto the market a lot faster, and the gap between competitor entries is becoming shorter. In addition, there’s a move towards more precision medicine and tailored patient care, as well as more curative therapies coming onto the market, which is causing considerable budget concerns for payers. In response, payers want to see more supportive evidence and robust data packs to warrant the price. Making an investment decision about an asset or evaluating commercial success depends on getting the right price and access.

“The power to forecast this earlier on in your life cycle … becomes a critical need so you can effectively determine the return on investment earlier on. … It’s really important to have an idea of what’s required by the payers to get the price and access that you need for that commercial viability.”

At GPI, we have developed offerings that help support agile price and access forecasting earlier on in the life cycle, as well as the ability to consider multiple scenarios. This really helps support decisions as you go through product development and launch with an evidence-based mindset. Instead of having a snapshot view of each stage, you get a motion picture of your journey that adapts every time the landscape evolves or the asset matures. Instead of getting human biased behavior influencing results or skewing data, you get a robust evidence-based view. It can be used during early phases where you have a great level of uncertainty and where the speed of insights is really critical, all the way through to pre-launch and indication expansion where you have less uncertainty but there’s more competitive play that comes into the scenario.

“Instead of delivering these projects that take weeks or months to complete, GPI’s offerings help you get these rapid insights faster, and so you’re able to forecast quicker.”

How did you come up with the idea? Tell us more about the process involved in bringing this solution to life. What hurdles did you need to overcome?

I’m a pharmacist by profession and I’ve worked in this space for a number of years. I’ve also got a really deep understanding of medicine pricing from both a commercial and payer perspective. I’ve conducted many projects involving payer and key opinion leader research, and witnessed first-hand some of the drawbacks of using this methodology when you’re determining price and access, as well as some of the challenges, especially as the market’s moving faster and faster.

“With all of this I thought … there must be a better way of trying to connect the needs of the payer and the minds of the payer with the ambitions of industry, all with having the aligned goal of the patient at the heart of it.”

It came up as a concept based on attributing value to price and access, and that’s really what GPI horizon is. Value can be determined by any number of attributes and varies depending on the payer from country to country, and will continue to evolve over time as well. I’ve got a really clear vision of how we can adapt the traditional approaches by turning the whole process on its head and leveraging the power of technology.

“There’s so much we can do by using technology to really help disrupt this space and make it more efficient and effective.”

For example, we’ve recently valued a portfolio of medicines and the traditional approach would have taken us weeks, if not months, to mine through all this data, connect all these relationships, and format all the information. We were able to turn that piece of work around within three days because we’ve got these data-driven insights already. We also have reliable testing to show that we can forecast the outcomes of a medicine in a new launch within a 5-10% variance range depending on the country, which isn’t just powerful, but game-changing for this sector.

This is a very new solution. Why are GPI able to offer this?

We understand the challenges in this sector and the challenges coming in the future. We’ve seen first-hand some of the failings and successful launches of medicines recently. We combine deep domain expertise (e.g., price and access specialists) with data technology and analytics to craft really creative, innovative solutions. With the domain expertise, we understand some of the technicalities, processes, and complexities of pricing and market access, and we really understand what a payer needs.

GPI also has a legacy of providing data-driven insights, and we couple this with technical advances. In addition, we’ve got an agile customer-focused team to identify challenges, listen to clients, and provide fast and innovative responses. What’s really key to the heart of all of this is the passionate team who are truly committed to providing creative solutions to improve medicine access for patients.

“We do believe there’s a … better way of creating that sustainable balance between industry and payers, all with the glue of patients at the heart of it.”

In conclusion, GPI understands the current market needs for change and innovation; their vision is to disrupt this and improve the delivery of drugs to the market using high quality price and access insights. GPI’s data-driven, evidence-based strategies, analytics, and technical innovations support the biopharmaceutical industry and payers to achieve a sustainable balance between pricing medicines and patient access. To learn more, visit globalpricing.com.