Developing drugs with potential across multiple populations requires setting priorities. Equinox helps development teams quantify opportunity and risk by indication, to better inform prioritization decisions.
Clinical Improvement, Population Size, and Medical Need: A New Drug in 8 Indications
This graph shows how important commercial factors compare across candidate indications for a new drug: the sizes of the target populations, the level of unmet medical need in each population, and the improvement the drug would offer over the standard of care (SOC), which drives patient share.
This improvement will vary by indication. We use a rigorous technique to quantify that improvement, which we call “Clinical Innovation”. Validating using real world market performance, we have observed that these general rules hold up remarkably well:
Drugs with 10% or greater Clinical Innovation typically dominate their segments
Drugs with 5 to 10% Clinical Innovation achieve good patient shares
But new drugs with less than 5% Clinical Innovation typically struggle; they impose high risk on the developer
Moreover, we have quantified how Clinical Innovation correlates with a new drug’s market access, pricing potential, and patient share. We use those correlations to predict commercial outcomes for a drug in each of its target patient segments, providing development teams with a strategic perspective to compare opportunity and risk by indication.
In this example, the agent is highly innovative in 2L CRC (a large population), as well as in 2L TNBC and 1L ALK+ NSCLC. It also is moderately innovative in 1L and 2L melanoma, and 2L pancreatic cancer. In 2L prostate cancer, however, the agent’s Clinical Innovation is well below the 5% threshold, suggesting the agent will not be competitive in this population. In 3L melanoma, it offers modest improvement, but this indication will be required to get to the more lucrative 1L and 2L melanoma populations.
Calculating patient share as a function of Clinical Innovation, we can estimate the revenue outlook for the asset in each target population. Development teams use this output (and others from our process) to inform decisions about development strategy.
