Disease landscaping is an important tool for pharmaceutical companies as they assess their competitive environments.
Knowing what competitors are working on, what drugs are in the global research pipeline, and what new research is being published is all crucial to R&D. For drug companies, being able to visualize this landscape can be the deciding factor in a successful drug program.
Here are three tips that will help your disease landscaping efforts.
Visualize the Timelines of Competing Trials
Clinical trials aiming to research the same diseases or technologies as you, or trials with similar targets, can hamper your ability to recruit patients.
As Bain researchers KC George, Claire Oldfield, Jason Evers, and Jackie Flanagan point out, the last 20 years have seen a threefold increase in the number of drugs targeting orphan diseases, which means more manufacturers are competing for the same small patient pools.
Further, clinical trials themselves are running longer than they did in the past. There are many reasons for this, Pauline Deplasse at N-SIDE writes. Those include more complex protocols, the global scope of clinical research, and supply chain pressures.
There are both challenges and opportunities in the competitive landscape of clinical research. Understanding the timelines of your competition will reveal where you can pressure an advantage.
Understand Which Tools Work Best for Literature Monitoring
The number of medical publication and publishing channels grows year by year. Any thorough pharmacovigilance efforts will require companies to have eyes on several million global publications.
With a task of that size, you can easily run into data and process issues, including:
- Duplicate articles. You don’t want your software to be sifting through the same content over and over.
- Copyrights. You don’t want to buy full-text articles that are freely available. Nor do you want to risk sharing articles that you don’t have the right to share.
- Database interoperability. Are your source databases linked, or are you duplicating work or creating manual tasks for your team because of database interoperability?
Software can make or break a literature monitoring strategy. With the wrong tools, it becomes difficult to sift through the millions of publications to find relevant literature. Then, manual intervention — e.g. manually buying access to a specific article — can become necessary if the right rules and processes aren’t in place. That consumes time and money.
Literature monitoring is a key step in your disease landscape analysis. Ensure you have the right tools for that job.
Develop a Strategy for Integrating Real-World Data
During this decade, we have seen real-world data (RWD) and real-world evidence (RWE) emerge not just as contextual data but as drivers of pharma R&D.
In 2022, Deloitte’s Jeff Morgan, Karla Feghali, Christine Chang, and Wendell Miranda reported on a company survey that found biopharma companies had begun to invest heavily in RWD capabilities.
Specifically, they were planning to incorporate RWD data to support:
- The creation of regulatory-grade control arms.
- Product labeling.
- Reducing time to market through trial design.
“Additionally, nearly two-thirds of survey respondents reported that their organization had used RWD/E to assess disease incidence across socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic groups to improve trial diversity,” Morgan et al. write.
“The disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minorities fueled an ongoing need for trial populations that better mirror the real-world demographic of the populations affected.”
High-quality RWD will be increasingly critical in R&D and big-picture decision-making. Having reliable data sources and thoughtful strategies for integrating that data will continue to impact how pharma companies design trials, conduct business discovery, and plan their go-to-market strategies.
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Underpinning every aspect of your disease landscape assessment is data. Having access to robust, relevant data and the tools to parse it is what will accelerate R&D.
Anju’s TA Scan solution facilitates these kinds of assessments by providing those data sources. TA Scan gives you access to data from hundreds of thousands of clinical trials and millions of publications.
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