Pharma Company Monitors Competitors’ Rare Disease Portfolio Developments to Identify Opportunities and Threats Using Contify

A global leader in the pharmaceutical industry, with a keen focus on rare diseases, realized the importance of intensifying its market and competitive intelligence to maintain its top position in the niche area of rare disease treatments.

The company sought to develop a single source of truth of market intelligence for the entire organization. It decided to streamline and automate the gathering, categorization, and dissemination of pivotal data across several functions, including research, development, and market access.

More than just systematizing the process, the company’s aspiration was intelligence magnification — harnessing the power of technology to amplify human insight and decision-making across several core functions.

In an industry as dynamic as pharmaceuticals, staying ahead requires not only groundbreaking research but also an acute awareness of the competitive landscape. Following their initial consultations with Contify, the company outlined following business objectives for market intelligence:

• Comprehensive Competitive Landscape Understanding: Grasping the full spectrum of the competitive terrain, especially within the rare disease portfolio, to identify both opportunities and threats.
• Rapid Insight Dissemination: Ensuring that fresh market and competitor insights swiftly reaches the appropriate teams. Speed in this aspect is of the essence, ensuring that the company remains agile in its response.
• Empowering the Global Commercial Team: By feeding them with timely and relevant intelligence, the company aims to enable the team to make informed decisions and strategize the next course of action, ensuring that the company maintains its leadership position in the industry.
• Synchronized Strategic Execution: In a global pharmaceutical company, intelligence doesn’t operate in silos. It was paramount for the organization to ensure that Business Development (BD), Marketing, Commercial teams, and Senior Leadership are all aligned and on the same page. The objective here was twofold:
  • Unified Intelligence Distribution: To ensure that these diverse teams, each with their unique needs and focus areas, receive tailored intelligence relevant to their specific functions. This means that while BD might be looking at potential mergers or partnerships, Marketing would be keen on competitive product launches and market shifts.
  • Strategic Decision Alignment: By catering intelligence to these pivotal teams, the company wanted to ensure that all major decisions—whether it’s a marketing campaign, a business development initiative, or a commercial strategy—are backed by the latest market insights, promoting unified and strategic actions across the board.

The nuanced nature of the pharmaceutical industry, especially when dealing with rare diseases, presents its own set of unique challenges. For the company, these challenges were particularly pronounced:

Manual Effort Overload: Due to the scarcity of information on rare diseases, the manual trawling process to find relevant intelligence became excessively time-consuming and inefficient. The low data volume meant that each piece of information was akin to finding a needle in a haystack.

Disparate Information Sources: While databases provided a certain depth of information, they were just one piece of the larger puzzle. The company sought insights from a myriad of channels, including news, primary intelligence, reports, and social media. 

The absence of a unified platform to consolidate these insights resulted in scattered intelligence, hampering holistic decision-making.

Need for a Centralized Intelligence Platform: Beyond just aggregating data, the company was in dire need of an integrated intelligence platform that could seamlessly blend diverse sources of intelligence. 

The goal was to provide a 360 degree view of the competitive landscape, helping teams to decipher patterns, identify opportunities, and strategize responses in a coherent and timely manner.

Contify configured a comprehensive market and competitive intelligence platform tailored for the pharmaceutical company’s unique focus on rare diseases, by leveraging their proprietary technology and domain analysts.

Taxonomy Creation

To lay the foundation for precise and targeted information gathering, Contify initiated its approach by curating a specialized taxonomy tailored for the pharmaceutical company. This taxonomy was constructed around core indications, with a focus on rare diseases such as Alagille Syndrome, NASH/NAFLD, Angelman Syndrome, Acromegaly and C3 Glomerulopathy, to name a few. 

Moreover, to gain a panoramic view of the market and ensure comprehensive intelligence, the taxonomy was enriched with key strategic topics. These ranged from business moves of competitors like funding, investments, expansions, financial results, and mergers, to more specific developments like clinical trials, regulatory updates, and patent disclosures.

Curated Newsfeed

By harnessing the power of the custom taxonomy, Newsfeeds ensured that the pharma company’s teams get the most relevant updates in a timely manner. Whether it was fresh scientific literature, a newly granted patent in the rare disease space, or executive changes within competitor companies, newsfeeds ensured an unwavering focus on the changing competitive landscape. 

This allowed for a seamless flow of relevant news articles, opinion pieces, and industry updates directly aligned with the company’s strategic areas of interest, ensuring users always remained at the forefront of critical developments.

Email Alerts

In addition to updates on the newsfeed, an automated email alert was dispatched to the designated user or team whenever a new piece of information surfaces anywhere on internet that matches the set parameters in the taxonomy. This ensured market awareness, enabling swift decision-making based on the most updated market intelligence.

Curated Intelligence Newsletters

To address the need for swift and pertinent dissemination of market and competitive intelligence, Contify curated newsletters for the company, meticulously segmented for optimal utility and relevance, with the following sections:

Industry Updates

• Market Trends: Insights into evolving market dynamics, emergent needs in the rare disease sector, and industry benchmarks.
• Regulatory Shifts: Updates on any changes in global or regional pharmaceutical regulations, especially those affecting rare disease treatments.
• Stakeholder Movements: Tracking shifts in major industry stakeholders’ positions, investments, or partnerships that could impact the rare disease market.

Competitor Updates

• Product Launches: Detailed insights into new treatments or solutions introduced by competitors in the rare disease segment, allowing the company to gauge the evolving competitive landscape.
• Strategic Partnerships: Announcements or hints of collaborations, mergers, or acquisitions that could shift market dynamics and influence the company’s strategic moves.
• Operational Milestones: Important operational updates, such as expansion into new regions, setting up of new research facilities, or significant hires that can hint at a competitor’s future direction.
• Financial Highlights: Quarterly or annual financial results, giving a snapshot of the competitor’s economic health and stability. Special attention is given to R&D investments, as they can be indicators of future product pipelines.
• Regulatory Interactions: Updates on competitor interactions with global regulatory bodies, including any potential challenges or disputes, which can impact market positions.

Clinical Updates

• Clinical Trial News: A snapshot of ongoing or newly initiated clinical trials in the rare disease domain, including their phases, primary findings, and potential implications.
• Innovations in Treatment: Coverage of novel treatment methodologies, techniques, or tools making waves in the industry.

Patent Updates

• Patent Filings: Summaries of newly filed patents in the rare disease segment, offering a peek into the potential future direction of treatments and solutions.
• Patent Approvals & Challenges: Insights into recently approved patents or those facing contention, offering a landscape of intellectual property in the domain.

Pharma Company’s Updates

• Internal Announcements: Key corporate messages, new hires, internal achievements, and essential communication from the leadership.
• Research and Development Milestones: Highlighting the company’s own advancements in R&D, including breakthroughs, study findings, and potential areas of exploration.
• Upcoming Events: A schedule of internal events, webinars, workshops, and conferences that the company will be part of or host.

Summaries

At the end of each section, a concise, digestible summary was provided. This ensured that even if the readers were pressed for time, they could quickly grasp the essence of the updates.

Each newsletter was encapsulated in a format that mirrored the company’s branding and visual design language, ensuring that the communication was consistent, professional, and familiar to the recipients.

Customized Dashboards

Contify understood the nuances and unique requirements of each function within the company. Here’s a detailed breakdown of the customized dashboards tailored for the research, development, and market access teams:

Research Team Dashboard

• Competitive Analysis: A detailed view of competitors’ advancements in the rare disease segment, their recent studies, findings, and potential patent filings.
• Rare Disease Spotlight: Highlights of recent discoveries or advancements specific to rare diseases, ensuring the research team is abreast of the latest in their field.
• Scientific Literature: Automated AI-generated summaries and links to newly published papers, journals, and articles relevant to their focus areas.
• Collaborative Initiatives: Updates on potential academic and industry partnerships, grants, or funding opportunities that might be of interest.

Development Team Dashboard

• Clinical Trials Tracker: Timely updates on ongoing clinical trials in the rare disease space, their phases, outcomes, and potential implications.
• Regulatory Updates: Notifications regarding changes in regulations, guidelines, or standards, ensuring the development process remains compliant.
• Supply Chain Intel: Insights into raw material availability, vendor developments, and potential disruptions that might impact the drug development process.
• Technological Advancements: Information on new technologies or methodologies emerging in the pharmaceutical development landscape, offering potential optimization opportunities.

Market Access Team Dashboard

• Market Landscape: Analysis of market trends, potential areas of expansion, and insights into patient demographics and needs.
• Reimbursement and Pricing: Continuous updates on reimbursement policies, pricing strategies, and potential barriers or opportunities in various global markets.
• Stakeholder Feedback: Collated feedback and sentiment analysis from patients, healthcare professionals, and other stakeholders to help shape market strategies.
• Competitor Market Movements: Insights into how competitors are positioning themselves in the market, including new product launches, marketing campaigns, and strategic alliances.

Through these meticulously crafted dashboards, Contify ensured that each team was equipped with the most relevant, up-to-date, and actionable intelligence, perfectly aligned with their specific goals and responsibilities.

MS Teams Integration

Recognizing the modern workspace’s shift to collaborative platforms, Contify seamlessly integrated its solution with Microsoft Teams. This allowed users to directly send updates, primary intelligence, and other pertinent information to MS Teams channels, further streamlining the communication process and ensuring that insights are readily accessible to all team members.

Comprehensive Understanding of the Competitive Landscape

Prior to Contify’s solution, the company’s grasp of the rare disease competitive landscape was scattered across different functions and teams of the company. By streamlining the process of gathering, categorizing, and disseminating intelligence, Contify has empowered the pharmaceutical leader to identify gaps in the market and be better positioned to seize emerging opportunities before competitors.

This enhanced understanding has directly led to strategic moves like accelerated R&D initiatives, proactive collaborations, and preemptive product launches, solidifying the company’s dominant position in the rare disease segment.

Augmented Agility in R&D

Research and development, the core driver in pharma, relies heavily on up-to-the-minute insights. With Contify’s curated newsfeeds and dashboards, the company’s research team received a goldmine of timely and pertinent updates. 

This has led to an accelerated pace in the development of novel treatments, informed adjustments in ongoing clinical trials based on timely competitor and industry movements, and a substantial reduction in potential redundant research efforts. 

Ultimately, this means faster time-to-market for breakthrough treatments, boosting the company’s reputation and potentially saving lives.

Reinforced Market Leadership through Strategic Commercial Actions

Empowered with a granular view of market dynamics, including competitor maneuvers and stakeholder shifts, the global commercial team has been able to chart out more informed, agile, and strategic paths. 

By anticipating market shifts and understanding stakeholder sentiments in real-time, the company has been able to fine-tune its marketing, sales, and outreach efforts. 

This, combined with insights from the regulatory environment, has ensured that market access strategies are both compliant and competitive, leading to expanded market shares in key territories and fortified relations with key stakeholders, especially in the realm of rare diseases.

“Before our collaboration, we grappled with information silos and the overwhelming manual task of deciphering relevant insights from the noise. Today, thanks to Contify’s tailored intelligence platform, we have managed to leapfrog our competition in the rare disease sector. The level of detail, from the curated newsfeeds to the meticulously segmented dashboards, truly resonates with our core business objectives. I commend Contify for their commitment to excellence and for playing a pivotal role in reinforcing our leadership position.”

– Director, Market Insights