Commercialization Strategy for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Commercialization Strategy for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Shah, Maulik (TU Delft Technology, Policy and Management)

Ortt, J.R. (mentor)
de Bruijne, M.L.C. (graduation committee)

Delft University of Technology

Management of Technology (MoT)

2019-10-30

This thesis report is aimed at analysing two phenomena, the first being - the major trends which are shaping the pharmaceutical industry currently. The industry is witnessing massive strategic shifts, routine upgrades to new drug technologies in a dynamic regulatory and market environment. The growth rate of the global pharmaceutical industry is projected to exceed 1 trillion dollars by 2022 (Lervolino & Urquhart, 2017). There are increasing expectations from pharmaceutical companies to introduce advanced products and technologies for the welfare of the people. This objective of this descriptive study is to analyse market, technological and strategic trends, the interrelations, and to some extent, the impact of regulatory environment on the pharmaceutical ecosystem. Secondly, this study lays a special emphasis on personalized medicine and assessing its current and future scope amid these changing dynamics. A combination of systematic literature review and expert interviews was undertaken to achieve the above stated objective. The study is qualitative and involves analysis of opinions derived from expert interviews cross verified with scientific literature. The key findings are stated below: Since traditional pharmaceutical companies now face increasing market and regulatory pressures to differentiate their products, they are looking for alternate business models. This pressure is supplemented by a change in payer preferences and healthcare budgets set by governments across the world. High risk of drug failures further adds on to this. Many companies are experimenting with radically different product lines such as biologics and biosimilars. In the recent years, pharmaceutical companies in conjunction with biotechnology companies have identified the potential of technologies such as genetic profiling, advanced diagnostics etc. to understand the effects of drug interactions with the human body. However, the use of such technologies remains largely confined to highly specialized therapeutic areas such as oncology. The main reason is the economic barrier it faces. The costs of most personalized drugs are extremely high, and this affects the market access of a drug. It was also found that, the readiness of the facilitating environment (patient data repositories, Information technology infrastructure) etc. is also essential for commercializing personalized medicine. Healthcare Institutions, service providers are still not equipped to deal with personalized medicine on a mass level. Hence personalized medicine is predicted to remain as a niche offering limited to a select few therapeutic areas such as oncology in the foreseeable future. Two promising avenues for rapidly commercializing personalized medicine were identified: The first relates to develop financing mechanisms for pharmaceutical companies so that they can develop novel drugs for people with serious medical conditions. The second avenue which was identified was designing optimal risk sharing agreements between pharmaceutical companies and the payers. For a detailed understanding of all trends, the relationships amongst them and the industry readiness to transition to personalized medicine, please refer to this report.

Pharmaceutical
personalized medicine
drug
trends
interrelations
strategy

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:075f0b87-636e-4781-a367-3e2d56ad4cc9

Student theses

master thesis

© 2019 Maulik Shah