The Target Product Profile—Your Blueprint for Drug Development

Posted on April 4, 2018 by Jeff Riegel

When utilized to its full potential, the Target Product Profile (TPP) is a dynamic, living document that ensures all stakeholders—clinical, regulatory, quality and manufacturing, commercial, market access, and medical affairs—are working from the same blueprint. Unfortunately, the TPP often has a bad rap within industry because many people think it is too rigid for today’s drug development environment. But often that reflects a failure to truly collaborate or a tendency to let the TPP get stale. To be effective, the TPP must be continually updated based on changes in the data and the competitive landscape. When companies take a balanced approach to developing the TPP and have a dynamic process that allows them to monitor and adapt it, as needed, they build agility into their drug development program that allows them to make critical go/no-go decisions or course corrections when necessary.

By using the TPP to ensure everyone is on the same page, drug developers can avoid costly delays when, for example, manufacturing isn’t ready to scale up to commercial production when the phase 3 data comes in ahead of schedule. Keeping a close eye on the evolving therapeutic landscape helps the development team anticipate what data will be needed to support labeling claims that may serve as a key differentiator from the competition and provide added value in the marketplace. So let’s look at how a dynamic TPP—one that is proactively updated—can help achieve the critical success factors introduced in the last installment. Continue reading →

Co-pay card adjustment programs: How do they affect patients, payers, and pharma?

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Kenneth Ng

“Co-pay cards” (or “co-pay coupons”) are financial assistance programs from drug manufacturers (pharma) that drastically reduce the out-of-pocket (OOP) costs for someone who needs an expensive medication. These programs are controversial:

- Pharma and patients believe that these programs allow sick people to afford the medications they need.

Healthcare payers (ie, insurance companies or their pharmacy benefit managers [PBMs]), however, regard such programs as schemes that circumvent their cost-management techniques (such as formulary tiers and patient cost-sharing). This is because with no financial impact from OOP costs, doctors and patients could decide to use more expensive drugs than the ones preferred by the insurance plans (eg, generic or well-established branded drugs).

Because of these opposing points of view, payers have tried (with limited success) to disallow co-pay cards if possible, and pharma is developing new ways to circumvent payer controls. This “cat-and-mouse” game has antagonized payer-pharma relationships as each are pursuing different goals: payers are trying to manage expensive medication use, whereas pharma is trying to maximize their sales and prescription volumes.
Continue reading →

Mapping a Successful Path to Label Optimization

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Jeff Riegel

Bringing a drug to market is a long and expensive process. An analysis by the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development estimated the total cost of development from discovery to commercialization at $2.6 billion over the course of about 10 years (based primarily on big pharma companies). This represents more than a 10‑fold increase since the 1970s, when a drug could be developed from bench to bedside for less than $200 million (Figure 1).¹ Others estimate the cost to commercialize a drug to be much lower (< $1 billion when they consider small biotech companies),² yet it is generally accepted that the cost of drug development is on the rise. A major driver of those rising costs is the money spent on drug candidates that never make it to market because of safety concerns or lack of efficacy. The bottom line is that there is no room for costly mistakes, miscalculations, or inefficiencies in the drug development process.
Continue reading →