Your compound through the eyes of the competition

Transcript

Your compound through the eyes of the competition

[00:00:00] Alexander: Welcome to another episode of The Effective Statistician. This will be a little bit of a short episode, so no big intro, no big outro, just me telling you about a very interesting story that I recently had. As you may know, I’m talking to all different people across the industry all the time. For all kind of different reasons. And recently I was talking with someone because that person needed help in terms of getting a contract decision. And I, from my network, provided with a couple of different options for the different needs she had. And that was all fine. And if you need any help in terms of finding resources and just reach out to me, I can actually help you with that, but that is not the main point of the story.

The industry is pretty small, and that person was working at a competitor of the company I was working in before. That came clear when we talked about her need to communicate her data effectively. Her compounds that she was really interested in moving forward was in phase three, actually already in regulatory approval or regulatory review. And now it became really clear that they didn’t have a good story to tell. They didn’t have good data visualizations to show the differentiation against the standard of care where they actually had a head to head study. They desperately needed this for a couple of different reasons.

The first is, They wanted to explain to regulators the differentiation. The second and yet much more important thing is, They also wanted something in their value dossier. So if you have never heard about the value dossier, that is a dossier that is usually written on a global level and is then intended to be the source for all the different local HTA submissions. So all the different countries around the world have different HTA systems and these different HTA people in into different affiliates will then pull from these HTA dossier to fill in their individual country needs. Usually that’s not sufficient, but let’s not go into that difference. That’s different direction. That’s a yet topic.

What is really important is that you can show your data convincingly. Within HTA discussions, it’s really about getting pricing, reimbursement, and access right, and showing clearly how you are better. How you differentiate from the competition is very important. Otherwise, you’ll get, second line too. So everybody first needs to be treated with a competition before they can be treated with your drug. Or maybe you get only limited access. Yeah, so is that only a small portion of the patients who could benefit, actually can benefit, or maybe you’ll not get surprised that you want and therefore you can’t fuel further innovation within your company, or maybe your company goes belly up if it’s small enough. There are lots of different consequences to this.

And the last part of course, was her concerns about the medical affairs part, so the commercialization part. Within medical affairs, within the commercial setting, you need to communicate your data very effectively because very often you will only have some minutes to show your data, and she really was desperate about something that stands out from the crowd. Now the funny thing is I was showing her some work that I had did in the past and she was thinking like, wow, you are the guy in, he’s data visualization. At the time she was working at the competition, they were really scared about the compound that I was working on.

And when that compound hits the market, of course, at the first conference where, lots of the data was released, she and all her colleagues were sitting front row to see what we have. And when they were seeing the first time, a pretty innovative way of showing the data, they were actually a little bit scared. Scared, first impressed, and then they started to create something similar. They saw directly the power that this new way of visualizing the, in this case, efficacy data, had, through this data visualization, they could directly see how fast the drug was working. How effective across all patients that were working. How consistent over time it was working, that the patients stayed in the response area where they should be, how deep the response was. Through the data visualizations that actually leveraged individual patient level data. So not any summary statistics. It actually also used summary statistics. You could also create a lot of trust with the audience because all the patients were there. You could see the individual patients, and that helped a lot for this new company that I was working with new in terms of new kit on the block in the therapeutic area to establish credibility with the Target customers.

Long story short, years after this event, this still opened door for me working on data visualization to convey a clear story to differentiate your compound. Or maybe also to show that, nothing serious is happening on the safety side. That all the events, start maybe early, never get moderate or severe, and mostly fastly go away or don’t lead to any treatment on this conation or whatsoever. All kind of these different things you can very effectively show with data visualization. Now there’s two things that you can do to improve your data visualization skills, and I think you probably should do both. The first is join the Data Visualization Special Interest Group. This is an awesome group.

It is running now for a couple of years and they have some awesome content out there. So check the show notes in terms of looking into this. Lots of free content there. If you want to fast track. Your data visualization skills, so if you don’t want to spend, a lot of time, going through all the different things there on the data visualization homepage of the si, if you want to get more bite sized content, if you want to get, direct help from me.

Then there’s another opportunity. Check out the Effective Statistician Data Visualization course. Through this course, you will learn all the fundamental things and also a lot of actionable tips and tricks to get to a really good data visualization. I’m not only talking about what makes a good data visualization. But also the process of data visualization. The process for getting to a good data visualization is in many ways very different to getting to a good table. So have a look into these two different resources. The PSI data visualization or PSI EFSPI Data Visualization special interest group. You can find it on the PSI homepage, psiweb.org and check out the link in the show notes to the effective statistician data visualization course, which is part of the Effective Statistician Academy, which includes many more opportunities to improve your skills to become an effective statistician.