The pharmaceutical ecosystem is rapidly evolving. With over 22,000 drugs in various stages of development, spanning diverse therapeutic areas and emerging modalities such as CAR-T treatments and gene therapies, the scale of research and development is truly staggering. This ongoing innovation is pushing the boundaries of medical science.
Looking ahead to 2025, we expect the momentum to continue, with 54 to 63 new drug launches planned. This trajectory not only highlights the industry’s resilience but also demands a reevaluation of current best practices in shepherding drugs from research through to launch.
The convergence of human-centered insights and advanced analytics presents an unprecedented opportunity to improve our odds of success. This article shares perspectives, guidance, and real-world examples that can help improve your chances of achieving pipeline and pre-launch success.
Before we jump into the five ways, let’s understand the foundational drivers of insight needs between pipeline and pre-launch:
Understanding the Drivers of Success for Pipeline Assets
In the life sciences industry, priorities for new therapeutic assets evolve significantly as they move through various phases—pipeline, pre-launch, launch, and maintenance. For early pipeline assets, flexibility, durability, and strategic foresight are essential. Insights at this stage must accommodate the uncertainties of drug development while laying a foundation for commercialization and market success.
Scenario planning is critical during the early stages of pipeline development. It allows teams to consider multiple possible futures and visualize various clinical trial outcomes, guiding strategic decisions that lead to a compelling market positioning. GSK’s scenario planning exercises during the development of Shingrix, for example, helped the company explore market entry scenarios, taking into account competitor actions, physician perceptions, and regulatory changes. By modeling these possibilities, GSK created a flexible strategy, positioning Shingrix for market dominance, even in the face of established competitors.
Pre-launch assets need to facilitate rapid decision-making in a competitive landscape, focusing on behavioral economics to understand how HCPs and patients make treatment choices. While clinical data offers critical insights, it often overlooks the hidden psychological barriers and cognitive biases that affect prescribing behavior and patient adherence. Pharma leaders must avoid over-relying on rational factors alone, as behavioral science reveals that decisions in healthcare—like all human decisions—are shaped by unconscious motivators and may not align with rational expectations.
Here are the five critical ways to leverage insights to improve your odds of success:
1. Moving from asset-led to needs-led strategy
2. Future casting to envision multiple scenarios
3. Prioritizing empathy as a core pillar of research
4. Leveraging generative AI and advanced analytics
5. Using the PROsician™ Model to Understand HCP Perspectives
1. Moving From Asset-Led to Needs-Led Strategy
This shift from focusing solely on clinical and functional attributes to embracing deeper emotional and behavioral insights is critical for identifying unmet needs. Traditional product strategies often focus on features and benefits, leading to missed market opportunities. Instead, companies should adopt a needs-led approach, starting with a deep understanding of unmet needs and latent desires. This method helps brands identify “value pools”—specific pockets of market demand that can become the foundation for strong market positioning.
For instance, a rare disease brand conducted deep patient ethnographies and triangulated these behavioral science driven insights with observed behaviors from social and digital data. This approach uncovered surprising lifestyle and emotional needs in a subset of patients that had been ignored by competitors. The result was a more compelling market position, driven by a new value proposition that resonated deeply with the targeted patient group.
2. Future Casting to Envision Multiple Scenarios
In an ever-changing market, future casting is a powerful tool for shaping the future landscape. Future casting isn’t about predicting the future with certainty; rather, it prepares companies for multiple likely outcomes, including “black swan” events—high-impact, low-probability scenarios. HCPs, like all humans, are influenced by cognitive biases—overestimating familiar treatments (availability bias) or sticking to defaults (status quo bias). Future casting helps anticipate these biases and design strategies to counter them.
As one of our clients said, “We used future casting workshops with key opinion leaders to explore treatment paradigms for autoimmune diseases in 2030. This exercise revealed unexpected opportunities in combination therapies that reshaped our thinking about the long-term product strategy.”
By helping HCPs adopt a forward-looking mindset, future casting allows companies to evaluate assets through different lenses, anticipate risks, guide decisions, and uncover expansive opportunities in a way they’ve never been able to do before.
3. Prioritizing Empathy as a Core Pillar of Research
Amid the complexity of the data available, it’s crucial not to lose sight of the human truths that drive decision-making. Empathy for both patient and HCP needs ensures that insights resonate on a personal level and can provide a more agile, human-centered approach to development. Empathy-driven research can help identify emotional drivers and barriers—such as loss aversion or regret minimization—that influence how HCPs prescribe or avoid new treatments.
Empathy doesn’t just help you stay connected to the human side—it’s a strategic advantage. Brands that deeply understand both the emotional and cognitive needs of their audiences can craft more persuasive narratives and strategies, helping them stand out in crowded markets and drive meaningful differentiation.
For example, when developing a migraine therapy, we used a combination of video diaries and social media conversations to understand the emotional toll migraines took on patients and their families. Grounded in this deeper, empathy-driven understanding, we integrated these insights with AI-generated digital avatars, created by our AI Agent, Stella.ai. Conversations with these avatars helped us uncover new mechanisms of action and support structures, shaping a winning patient-centric strategy.
4. Leveraging Generative AI to Power Advanced Analytics on Unstructured Data
Generative AI is revolutionizing how companies mine and analyze unstructured data. AI agents like Stella.ai can process vast amounts of qualitative data, uncovering hidden patterns and connections across multiple sources. This approach significantly accelerates discovery, enabling a more nuanced understanding of language, sentiment, and context.
In a study of oncologists’ preferences for treatment options, Stella.ai analyzed 483 IDI transcripts and detected early signals about shifts in attitudes toward toxicity—insights that weren’t evident in any of the other research. This insight inspired a strategic shift, contributing to a double-digit increase in new patient starts.
One client even used a supervised learning model to reduce the timeline for developing a target product profiles (TPPs) from an average of 3-1/2 months to less than four weeks, exponentially accelerating their go-to-timing.
5. Using the PROsician™ Model to Discriminate Distinct HCP Perspectives
Pharma companies view HCPs as a homogeneous group, mostly ignoring the diversity in their perspectives on innovation. The PROsician™ model, we built over the past five years, addresses this by categorizing HCPs into four distinct types, based on their attitudes toward new therapies and behavioral tendencies:
Dr. Forward Thinker: Keeps up with the latest innovations; content-focused and motivated by positive outcomes and future gains.
Dr. Go Forit: First to try new therapies; prone to optimism bias; eager to embrace new treatments without waiting for exhaustive data.
Dr. Wait N. See: Prefers to wait for proven success before adopting new treatments; prevention-focused and influenced by loss aversion, has a cautious approach to change.
Dr. No, NoNo: The most resistant to adopting new therapies; anchored in status quo bias and hesitant to deviate from familiar treatment paradigms.
By applying this model, marketers and commercial leaders can engage early adopters like Dr. Forward Thinker while addressing the concerns of more cautious HCPs like Dr. Wait N. See. For an oncology launch, the Shapiro+Raj team, recruited and facilitated co-creation workshops with both Forward Thinkers and Go Forits, using the PAR (participatory action research) principles and future casting techniques. The insights resulted in a value proposition that not only created a distinctive space for the asset, but also made it easier for Wait N. See’s to jump on board.
Taking the Next Step Toward Strategic Advantage
As the industry continues to evolve, the ability to generate, interpret, and act on insights has become a key differentiator. Success in pipeline and pre-launch assets hinges on embracing flexibility, empathy, and strategic foresight. By adopting a needs-led approach, leveraging behavioral science-driven insights and advanced analytics, and preparing for multiple future scenarios, you can improve the odds of success.
To recap, the five critical ways to leverage insights for future-proofing pharma pipeline and pre-launch readiness are:
1. Moving from asset-led to needs-led strategy
2. Future casting to envision multiple scenarios
3. Prioritizing empathy as a core pillar of research
4. Leveraging generative AI and advanced analytics
5. Using the PROsician™ Model to Understand HCP Perspectives
At Shapiro+Raj, we’re passionate about helping our clients navigate the complex landscape of drug development and commercialization. Our team of social scientists, strategists, and analysts, combine deep therapeutic knowledge with future forward methodologies to deliver actionable insights that drive success.
Contact us at [email protected] or visit our website www.shapiroraj.com to start a conversation about how we can shape the future, together.