CASE STUDIES

How can we size our potential market when the population is difficult to define?

A launch planning team for a new metabolic treatment faced a big question:

How can we forecast the drug’s market potential when we aren’t able to accurately size the patient population with current data?

The team knew the market opportunity was significant, but faced several barriers to getting an accurate forecast:

  1. This was a relatively new market, with few published studies on the patient population.
  2. The population was a niche subset of much larger group of diseases with some overlap and characteristic “blurring.”
  3. The specific disease was not commonly diagnosed by physicians.
  4. The forecast required segmentation by granular characteristics (i.e., procedure type).
  5. The indication lacked an established model for validating the true size of the market.

Having assessed the challenges, the team realized that a traditional, single-data-source approach would not yield satisfactory results for this drug and niche population.

Solution

Integrated market sizing to build a previously undefined patient segment

The launch team partnered with Clarivate to determine the right approach and data sets that would give them a confident market size.
PHASE 1:Approach alignment

Clarivate assembled a team of market consultants, epidemiology experts, and data scientists, bringing primary market research and methodology inputs, as well as a deep knowledge of the disease and landscape.

The team brainstormed the pros and cons of several potential approaches before landing on an integrated epidemiology and claims analysis which they deduced would provide the most realistic population size.
PHASE 2: Data extraction and analysis

  • Epidemiology research, incorporating adjacent diseases to pull out “overlap” patients.
  • Claims data analysis to drill deep into the subpopulation characteristics.
  • Integrated analysis of epidemiology and claims data to evaluate the strengths and gaps of each, and identify the strongest data sources for key steps in patient sizing.

PHASE 3: Market size definition and recommendations

Clarivate provided the launch team with the validated market size and key insights to address their business questions.

In addition, Clarivate walked the team through the nuances of the analyses and provided future recommendations on how to best to track this

population moving forward.

Results

With far greater confidence in their market size projections, the client was empowered to make better decisions around:

  • Forecasting the commercial opportunity for the drug
  • Assessing the of allocation investment

Clarivate Differentiators

  • World class data science and epidemiology data teams working in tandem to size the toughest populations
  • Consulting partners and therapeutic experts from the project outset, with deep market knowledge, ideas and fast answers – minimizing the time needed to “get up to speed”

Looking for more accurate market sizing? 

When you are faced with tough business questions, Clarivate analytics specialists are here to help you define the best path forward.