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Snowfish is highly regarded as a trusted resource and advisor to many leaders in the life science industry. While our projects are too numerous to count, there are a few that truly stand out as a testament to the quality, insight, and thoughtfulness that we bring to our work. We’ve outlined some of these examples below. Please click on the topic of interest to view the details.
Objective:
Our client has a product for treating a visual condition in children. It was previously managed with vision correction, but this therapy allows for disease modification. This resulted in a shift in the way eye care practitioners approached this condition as before availability of this therapy, it was not even considered a disease but rather, an inconvenience. The company was working toward moving the eye care community to view that treating this condition vs correcting vision was their ethical responsibility since it was associated with consequences down the road. There was a need to build awareness, education, and clinical guidance.
Methodology: It was agreed that starting with a solid network of stakeholder organizations would give the company “more bang for the buck” at least at the start. Professional society relationships are able to meet some of the stated objectives such as guidance, awareness and education. Snowfish conducted a stakeholder organization landscape assessment with comprehensive engagement planning. Approach started with an assessment of perceptions and unmet needs among internal stakeholders and their current KOLs. We included detailed and comprehensive analysis of a selection of stakeholder societies in nine countries based on primary and secondary sources. Snowfish also built custom link maps illustrating valuable connections between groups.
Results: The output was a series of detailed profiles of each group along with an engagement plan. Snowfish provided a roadmap of the who, how and why relative to how best to approach and partner with this network of organizations. This included individuals with whom to cultivate relationships (“champions”) along with “on the shelf” programs and new concepts to be discussed. Recommendations were all based on barriers to therapy adoption that were identified and specifics on disease state interest, plan for guidance and how the group engages with industry.
Our client received a customized approach to each organization. This gave them a roadmap on who and how to collaborate with on their various objectives. The engagement plan was determined to be extremely valuable in planning short- and long-term activities along with budget. each country had the necessary information to build more effective relationships with their relevant stakeholder groups.
Objective: An innovative medical device company developed a revolutionary material that literally has hundreds of potential medical applications. Snowfish was asked to provide a strategic product development evaluation for some of the most promising product concepts. The company was relying on the analysis to make multi-million dollar product development decisions. They also needed to compare one product opportunity against another.
Methodology: Snowfish developed an overall product evaluation matrix. Each product analysis involved several months of work with very detailed analysis. We leveraged multiple primary and secondary data sources including:
Results: Snowfish was able to develop a very clear and compelling analytic framework for the company to compare multiple product opportunities in vastly different therapeutic areas. We were able to evaluate each product concept along the following business and clinical concepts:
Snowfish also assigned a relative weighting to each variable that was client driven. Based on the relative weightings, the client was able to get a very clear picture of the market opportunity. This has enabled the company to focus their development efforts and avoid wasting millions of dollars on product concepts that were very unlikely to ever pay off. Snowfish continues to work with the client on multiple projects.
| External Factor | Product A | Product B | Product C | Product D | Product E |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Physician Interest | 10 | 8 | 2 | N/A | 9 |
| Product Differentiation | 10 | 10 | 1 | 3 | 8 |
| Patient Interest | 9 | N/A | N/A | N/A | N/A |
| Product Revenue | 8 | 2 | 1 | 2 | 9 |
| Market Profitability | 5 | 6 | 1 | 2 | 9 |
| Entry Barriers | 5 | 5 | 2 | 1 | 2 |
| Market Growth | 5 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 |
| Distribution/Physician Population | 7 | 9 | 9 | 7 | 5 |
| Competitive Intensity | 8 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 4 |
| Rate of Adoption | 9 | 7 | 2 | 1 | 3 |
| Untreated Patient | 8 | 1 | 1 | 2 | 7 |
| Average | 7.6 | 5.2 | 2.3 | 2.3 | 6.0 |
Objective: A mid-sized pharma company was partnering on a phase 2 therapy for acute myeloid leukemia (AML). It was novel in that it was assumed to have better tolerability in the older adult population. This was the company’s first entry into not only AML but oncology in general. To facilitate the company’s education, awareness, communications, clinical trial, and overall planning efforts, there was a significant need to understand the key trends and build the stakeholder landscape related to diagnosis, management, and coverage.
Methodology: Snowfish created a custom solution to identify key trends and map the stakeholder landscape for AML in older adults using secondary and primary sources. Secondary sources were used to determine trends in AML in older adults and in geriatric oncology in general. This was followed by identification and profiling of the professional societies that play a role in awareness and education. Organizational outreach was implemented. The last component was designed to determine where to target phase 3 clinical trials. This was done through an analysis of comparable/competitive products and the academic organizations and individuals working on them.
Results: Trend analysis noted a variety of insights. Geriatric considerations for cancer care were lacking through there was a growing number of geriatric oncology clinics in the U.S. Treatment pathways for AML in older adults were non-existent. Age was a key factor in undertreatment. Care models, workforce issues and strategic partnerships were also identified. The top professional societies most relevant to AML in older adults were mapped and profiled. This was multidisciplinary: physician, nursing, pharmacy, physician assistant. Found that a handful of individuals and institutions tended to dominate the relevant activities related to investigational therapies. Otherwise, there was relatively large amounts of diversity.
This provided a robust illustration of the stakeholder landscape from the perspective of societies, academic institutions, and researchers. Increased the focus on these stakeholder in light of the issues AML and cancer care in general among over adults. The information gained through this analysis was used to target specific societies for partnership on particular programs and activities and build a database of potential investigators for phase 3. It was clear who is active in this space but also potential conflicts if an investigator is engaged with a directly competitive study.
Objective: COMPANY has a robust focus in neuroscience including psychiatry. However, it is well-known that clinical trials in psychiatry have a very high rate of failure, particularly between phases 2 and 3. The Precision Medicine team who was leading an effort to improve success of clinical trials, thought that this phenomenon was related to issues in the earlier stage trials, mainly weaknesses of standard evaluation tools. Many use subjective measures. They considered that the use of biomarkers could effectively augment these measures by providing physiologic support and more accurate evidence of therapeutic effect. There was a need to get a solid idea of the types of biomarkers used in trials for psychiatric conditions and how they are used.
Methodology: Snowfish designed a landscape analysis leveraging data from Clinicaltrials.gov and PubMed. Clinicaltrials.gov was used to narrow the biomarkers down to four types to focus upon. Using carefully selected key words, we pulled up all trials within the specific conditions that either used a biomarker or where the biomarker was the focus of the study. The biomarkers were then included in relevant searches of PubMed where a deep dive was performed into the articles that gain, included them either as a measure or the study focus. Multiple data points related to the study designs and results were abstracted and summarized in a comprehensive database and report. The goal was to provide a clear picture of how biomarkers were used in clinical trials and the details around them.
Results: After 100s of biomarkers were identified, the list was narrowed down based on factors such as study volume and relevancy. The PubMed search yielded an initial 15,000 articles which through exclusion criteria resulted in a few hundred in the final dataset. Gained insight on the heterogeneity of how biomarkers are used and studied in psychiatry clinical trials and the difference in frequency by condition. Also, how they correlate with particular symptoms and disease severity. It was surprising as to how few randomized clinical trials used biomarkers. This all confirmed that this is still a relatively new area is psychiatry studies.
The Precision Medicine team was very impressed by the comprehensive yet clarity of the information provided in the report and database. This provided them with clear direction in order to take the next step in determining if and how to employ biomarkers in their early-stage psychiatry studies. They also learned that a number of their assumptions held before the analysis were in fact inaccurate.
Objective: A top 10 pharmaceutical company currently marketing billions of dollars worth of products in a specific disease state area made the strategic decision to significantly increase collaboration with academic and research institutions. The purpose was to partner with institutions on early-stage research, turn it into clinical stage and eventually commercial products. Snowfish was tasked with identifying academic and research centers of excellence for the purpose of fostering long-term strategic relationships. A tremendous amount of data was analyzed. The client needed to go beyond the “usual suspects” and ensure that the goals and objectives of the centers of excellence are aligned with the company.
Methodology: Snowfish started out with a list of approximately 7500 organizations which was to be narrowed down through various factor weightings and re-ranking based upon a profile developed by both Snowfish and our client depicting the ideal partner organization. This analysis involved several months of work with very detailed analysis involving clinical, business, and technical expertise. The multiple disease-state-specific factors that we analyzed included:
Once we were able to identify our “short-list”, we conducted one-on-one in-depth interviews with key individuals within the organizations to detail their profile and offer our client everything they needed to know so that they could have a very fruitful initial meeting.
Results: Snowfish was able to narrow a tremendous number of organizations to the top 30 or the top 99.6% percentile. Very specific details about their organization including staff, research, goals, interests and aspirations were provided in a user-friendly format. Our client now has everything they need for senior management to make informed decisions on which organizations with whom to take the first step and how best to maximize the efficiencies of their initial meeting.