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 →

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.
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