Pharma Company Leverages Customized Intelligence Newsletters To Stay Abreast Of Competitors And Industry Developments On Rare Diseases

Founded in the early 1980s, this US-based leading pharma (pharmaceutical) company researches and develop drugs for patients with rare diseases. The company is also a member of the Alliance for Biosecurity, a consortium of companies committed to the research and development of vaccines and other measures to curb pandemics and bioterrorism.

The company was leveraging the expertise of a market research firm to stay abreast of developments on its competitors and a targeted list of rare diseases. However, the limited information coverage and the abysmal support from their existing vendor hampered their strategy formulation process.

The company was on the lookout for a market and competitive intelligence tool that provided daily intelligence newsletters with all the essential information to cater different functions — patent information to the legal team, scientific literature to the R&D team, competitor information to the competitive intelligence team, and strategic news updates to decision-makers and senior leadership.

The company wanted to track an exhaustive list of sources that included rare disease communities, societies researching rare diseases, scientific journals, patent databases, regulatory websites, clinical trials, analysts briefings, competitor websites, government websites, conferences, and several other news sources around the world.

The challenge was to source, track, process, and disseminate only the most relevant information from the long list of hard to retrieve online sources that cover information on rare diseases.

The availability of round-the-clock support with quick response times was also an important yardstick in selecting the right solution provider.

Created an Exhaustive List of Sources

Though the customer had a list of rare diseases and sources of information to track in place, Contify leveraged the expertise of its in-house pharma experts and research analysts to build upon, and create an exhaustive list of sources for the most comprehensive coverage:

• Researched for the scientific and local names of the rare diseases around the world.
• Identified websites of the welfare societies dedicated to people suffering from those rare diseases.
• Identified websites, reports and press releases of/from dedicated government and non-government research institutes.
• Identified competitors researching, or with products for rare diseases, in addition to the list shared by the customer.

Configured the Contify Platform

Configured a Custom Taxonomy

Personalized market intelligence is crucial to make it relevant to key stakeholders. Contify uses a combination of keyword-based rules and machine learning to accurately tag information. To make the information easily accessible, our experts had configured the taxonomy according to:

• Rare diseases: Fabry Disease, Gaucher Disease, Alkaptonuria, Dystonia-16
• Topics: Mergers and Acquisitions, Financial Results, Legal issues, etc

Added Custom Sources

The customer wanted to track essential information on clinical trials (from preclinical to phase-4), regulatory bodies like the FDA, EMA, PMDA, and NMPA, competitors’ corporate news (earnings calls, investment days, R&D linked to rare diseases), conference coverage, job postings, monitoring the twitter handles of key opinion leaders, competitors, and NGOs, and general news on products (approval, distribution, reimbursement and pricing) and global policies.

In addition to the above, Contify configured the platform to include intelligence from several premium and niche sources to which the customer had already subscribed.

Created Personalized Views

Enabled a quick view of the essential information by creating separate views for each team. For example, the legal team will just look at the data on regulatory and legal topic from the selected list of companies. This was done by applying custom taxonomy filters on topics and companies.

Created Customized Newsletters

One of the core requirements of the company was to send personalized intelligence newsletters on a daily basis. Using Contify’s Newsletter Manager, our team created personalized newsletters in custom templates customized to each function.

The information in the newsletter was structured into customized sections and subsections for easy readability. Additionally, the newsletter was styled to match the company’s branding visual design language.

Quality Assurance/ Human Curation

Automation is just one part of the Contify Market and Competitive Intelligence Platform. It is the human layer that makes the information in it most relevant for the users.

Contify’s quality engineers work closely with the solutions team right from day one till the final launch. During this phase, regular audits of the data were performed to check for anomalies. Post successful configuration of the platform, our team spent hours on rigorously testing parameters such as information relevance, duplicates and similar stories.

To ensure that the Contify Market Intelligence platform delivers the right information, we added the RSS links, created custom crawlers to track different sources, and integrated Google search results for relevant keywords.

After curating stories by human analysts for 3–4 days, we selected this date range and compared data in the Contify platform with data available on various paid and free information sources including Google and the press sections of important sources.

Training and Onboarding

The platform was developed and configured by experienced Market Researchers, who have years of experience in consulting roles.

Though the platform is self-intuitive, to keep the learning curve short, we conducted a thorough training session for all the 15 users of the client. To enable self-learning, we also shared access to Contify’s knowledge hub with all the users.

Support

To ensure that the company gets the most out of Contify, we provided round-the-clock support with a dedicated Customer Success Manager.

Since the company only had a single resource who managed their entire process, Contify acted as an extended market and competitive intelligence team to ensure that disseminated information is noise-free, and delivered in an accessible format. In collaboration with the company, Contify’s solution team formulated a highly strategic and executable project plan to ensure that every news gets verified before releasing it through the newsletter.

Contify also arranged for weekly check-ins to ensure that user feedback was promptly incorporated in the next newsletter.

Learn more about Contify

Empowered Teams to Strategize Effectively

Utilizing the power of Contify’s sourcing engine and the newsletter manager, the customer was able to keep all its teams updated on all important strategic updates. This enabled all the teams to strategize and execute for success.

Simplified and Automated the Information Sourcing Process

Information sourcing that was taking hours to just find sources and then retrieve had been simplified by combining the power of men and machine.

Gained an Edge Over its Competitors

Through easy access to essential information from hundreds of sources and proper segmentation, multiple stakeholders can easily analyze and plan to stay ahead of their competition.