Before most drugs are launched, much time and effort are spent developing marketing plans and getting approval. However, given the rapid changes in the market and the realization that too many tactics are more hype than reality, fixed marketing plans are a waste of time.
Category Archive: Working in the industry
I’ve seen some new energy and thinking taking root in some big pharma companies. Still, I’m also seeing some recycled executives show up at other companies when they should have been removed permanently from the industry.
The pharma industry’s reputation continues to slip from a pandemic halo-high of 62% in February 2021 to now when fewer than half, just 47%, of people have a favorable view of the industry, according to the Harris Poll’s latest survey. (Source: Endpoints News) Does anyone believe that pharma cares?
It’s not only getting harder for small biotechs to find funding; too many have scaled up operations by adding employees too quickly, forcing them to lay off people as the path to new drug approvals gets more complicated.
It’s hard not to read a story about how high drug prices are hurting patients, but while drug prices are too high and outpacing inflation, insurers, PBMs, and hospitals are taking huge slices of healthcare dollars with little notice from Congress and the media.
Biotech startups are hurting for money as investments in biotech startups start to decline. Biotechs need to think like marketers to cut through the noise and attract investors. It begins with a CEO who not only has a stellar medical background but understands how to get the company on the radar.
Biosplice, once the world’s most valuable biotech startup (reaching a $12 billion valuation in 2018), is laying off nearly a quarter of its workforce and has stopped internal development of one of its late-stage medicines, a treatment for hair loss in men, with hopes of licensing that program to another drug company. As VC funding for biotech companies becomes harder to obtain, patients are the real losers.
Board members and senior executives are bailing out of Biogen but will there be enough life vests? What has/is happening at Biogen is a train wreck, and the only way to correct this disaster is to tear it down and rebuild the company from the top down.