Pharmaceutical consulting

Alcimed assisted an American biopharmaceutical client in defining the launch strategy of its orphan drug in Europe, and then in structuring a concrete and operational plan, both at the level of the European region and at the level of each targeted country.

The launch plan is a roadmap for each of the company’s key functions (medical, marketing, production, regulatory, sales) and covers the period from pre-launch (before obtaining the MA – Marketing Authorization) to the first sales.

Today, our team is still involved in regularly updating the first plan defined with our client, according to internal or external developments around this orphan drug in several European countries.

We supported a leading pharmaceutical company in a prospective analysis of the role of the medical sales representative of the future. Our client, the company’s sales director, was faced with a context of changing customer engagement practices and wanted to draw up a vision of what the pharmaceutical sales representative’s job of the future might be.

We helped him to define a vision for 2030 and to build a roadmap with the different projects to be implemented to make his teams evolve towards this new role. We first led several working sessions with all the stakeholders involved in the different projects to identify the objectives, key steps, levers, resources, means, timing, indicators, expected deliverables and the functions involved for each project.

Then, we formalized this roadmap to facilitate its diffusion internally and to communicate on the next steps.

Alcimed helped a leading pharmaceutical player in analyzing the environmental impact linked to their transition initiative towards digital therapeutic trials.

Our help involved defining a model of comparison between different modes of clinical studies, both traditional and digital, by conducting a life cycle analysis focused on different groups of activities: travel and transportation, waste disposal, data production and storage. This model shed light on differences in climate impact, as well as their effects on human health, resource consumption (fossil energy, mineral raw materials, water), and biodiversity.

This project allowed our client to find and put in place improvement strategies to reduce the environmental impact of digital clinical trials worldwide.

We assisted a leading pharmaceutical company in the field of CAR-T therapies in preparing the launch of its new treatment and in defining its market access strategy in the United States, Canada and Europe. CAR-Ts are highly personalized technologies that require a high level of specialization to be delivered to patients, and therefore not all healthcare centers are ready to administer them. In this context, and in order to define the market access strategy for its new treatment, we helped our client to:

1. Understand and identify which centers would have the capacity to bring CAR-Ts to market.
2. Analyze the bottlenecks for approval in the in-scope markets.
3. Consequently, define the actions to be implemented to ensure access to its new CAR-T therapy.

After an investigation conducted in more than 200 healthcare centers in the United States, Canada and Europe, our analysis brought us to recommend to our client the next key steps to be taken in order to develop the skills of each center and to promote rapid access to their new treatment.

Our team assisted a pharmaceutical player who found that his innovation process was not agile and efficient enough.

We first exchanged with our client’s teams to get a detailed understanding of what was working well and to identify the malfunctions of the initial process. Then, we identified inspiring cases from industries outside healthcare but facing the same issues and we defined the guiding principles of the new process to be implemented.

With this material, we organized a “Sprint” bringing together about twenty representatives from the various departments and functions involved in innovation, in order to co-build the new model following the precepts of Design Thinking.

Ultimately, this work enabled us to co-construct with our client’s teams their new innovation process, more focused and more agile at the same time, allowing more disruption and empowerment of the teams!

One of our clients, a leading pharmaceutical company, wanted to improve the care of patients suffering from a rare disease by developing a high value-added service offering that would improve their well-being or quality of life throughout their care pathway (from diagnosis to palliative care).

To do this, our team interviewed patients, patient support workers and associations in each country involved in order to map their emotions and to identify the levers for improving their well-being and quality of life that could be addressed by developing services. Following this, our team pre-tested these service ideas with healthcare professionals, before organizing a workshop to co-construct a service development roadmap with our client’s medical and marketing teams.

Ultimately, several services were deployed in the pilot countries and then extended to other countries in the zone, improving the emotional pathway of patients and positioning our client as a major player in public health.

Our client, a leading pharmaceutical laboratory in the ophthalmology market, was lacking in reasons to decide whether or not to develop a translational research programs in its R&D strategy. We helped them in exploring the primary barriers and the associated levers to put in place in translational research, focusing mainly on benchmark cases. Our studies focused on three main points:

1. Identifying good practices for a pharmaceutical company to implement translational research activities
2. Determining the potential of applying translational research in the ophthalmology field
3. Defining the optimal organization of our client’s resources

In the end, our study enabled the client to have a complete vision on the ins and outs of translational research programs and the potential implications that their implementation could have on their global R&D strategy.

We supported a leading pharmaceutical player in a project aiming to study the impact of eco-designing their medications on their ecosystem (doctors, hospitals, pharmacists, patient associations, payers, regulators, etc).

Through an in-depth external investigation, our team measured the impact of ecological design levers on the entire life cycle of our client’s products, and provided a set of recommendations on priority actions to be integrated in the short, medium, and long term, with the aim of transforming our client’s development strategy into a green design approach.