[Paula Gray]

Lifecycle Management of Pharmaceutical Drugs Key to Sustaining Profitability

Life cycle management always has been a key focus for pharmaceutical executives who understand that extending the life of a blockbuster drug can mean hundreds of millions to billions of dollars more for a company.

Now as generic drugs appear ready to outstrip branded products' revenue in the next several years and product pipelines become slimmer, brand managers face the daunting task of extending the lives of their marketable drugs for even longer periods.

And with a myriad of strategies available - from new formulations, to combination products, to new indications, to OTC switching - choosing the tactics that best fit a particular drug are even more critical since a recent study from Best Practices, LLC shows that successful lifecycle management tactics can gain companies as much as 10 years of additional product life.

The research and consulting firm Best Practices undertook its life cycle management study to uncover how top pharmaceutical companies optimize products as they near expiry. The study, "Effectiveness of Pharmaceutical Lifecycle Management Tactics," identifies which tactics best extend product life. A sample of the finding can be downloaded at http://www3.best-in-class.com/br83.htm .

This study examined 18 brands at 11 best-in-class companies. It found that companies consider how much it will cost to extend a brand, how much expertise is necessary to undertake certain tactics and the overall cost of implementing such tactics when choosing a life cycle management approach.

Companies, in the United States and Europe, are discovering that it's insufficient to begin efforts to extend a product's lifecycle as patent expiry looms. Instead, companies must develop such strategies before a product launches. Combining data from these aforementioned areas, Best Practices created a quadrant graph showing such information as to which tactics are the least costly and easiest to implement versus those that are most difficult and most expensive to try.

Among the key findings:
- The average number of months gained by respondents using LCM strategies
ranged from two to 78 months.
- Sixty percent of respondents use these top five tactics most often: new
formulations, new indications, publication strategy, thought leaders
and line extensions. These five tactics also were the top five most
frequently successful tactics.

A sample of this study can be found at http://www3.best-in-class.com/br83.htm. It is the result of a Best Practices, LLC project for a pharmaceutical Business Excellence Board client. It is based on the survey responses of 11 leading benchmark partners in the pharmaceutical industry and can be found at the Free Study Findings of the Business Excellence Board section of Best Practices, LLC's website.