A few years back, I got a call from a former intern. She had just started her first full-time pharma role — rare disease, which meant: no playbook, no runway, no hand-holding.
She said: "Sanket, I have been asked to figure out the launch plan for this asset. I just started. How do I even begin?"
I've gotten versions of that question more times than I can count. Different people, different companies, different TAs. Same panic underneath it.
Here's what I told her. And what I tell everyone who asks.
The firehose is real. So is the shortcut.
In biotech, it's learning by drinking from a firehose on a good day.
There is a time for learning, and most of the time it's learning by doing. You don't get a grace period to read your way into competence. You are expected to produce.
But here's the thing most people miss when they're drowning: one of the most underappreciated sources of knowledge in this entire industry is what's already been done.
Not theory. Not framework. Not what your professor published.
What your competitor actually did — in sequence, in public, on the record.
The blueprint is already written. You just have to find it.
Start with the asset that owns the market. Or the last asset that launched as best-in-class. Or the best-in-class launch from an adjacent TA with comparable access dynamics.
Then go to work.
Hunt down every press release, FDA announcement, approval milestone, trial timeline. Benchmark key publications, congress events, and abstracts around each commercial milestone. Phase 2 readout. Phase 3 initiation. sNDA/sBLA. Label expansion. Payer negotiation windows.
Map it all to a timeline.
Then ask the harder question: what was being said, when it was being said, and WHY it was being said at that exact moment?
That "why" is the blueprint.
Every publication has a purpose. Every abstract placed at every congress was placed there for a reason. The IST that ran three years before approval was not a coincidence. The PRO instrument validated ahead of the submission wasn't an accident.
They were building something. In sequence. Deliberately.
Your job is to reverse-engineer it.
Put your HCP hat on.
Work through the evidence trail the way a prescribing clinician would have experienced it.
How did the RWE help expand the population beyond the trial-eligible window? How did it reassure the parents of a distressed pediatric patient about real-world safety — safety they couldn't see in a 200-patient pivotal? How did it allow dosing personalization across the six different medication classes the patient was already on?
How did PRO and COA data shift the conversation from "this drug works" to "this drug is the one I'm choosing for thispatient, over that other drug"?
That's the granularity you're looking for. Not what the data said. What the data did — for whom, at what point in the clinical journey, and why it mattered.
Put your payer hat on.
Now run it again from the access side.
How did the evidence reduce payer uncertainty? How was value articulated — economically, humanistically, clinically — and for which audience in which market?
What did Germany consider patient-relevant, and how did that shape the AMNOG dossier? How did NICE appraise the model and the submission package? What did the committee accept, what did they push back on, and what does that tell you about what you'll need to defend when your asset lands in front of them?
All public information. All accessible. All waiting to be assembled.
This used to take weeks. It doesn't anymore.
Claude can do all this in minutes BTW.
Seriously. You can prompt your way through a competitor's entire publication timeline in an afternoon. Pull the abstracts, map the congress sequence, identify the evidence gaps they filled and when they filled them. Cross-reference approval timelines with what was published and what wasn't.
The analytical heavy lifting has changed. Which means the expectation has changed too. There is no excuse for going into a strategy session without having done this.
On perfection, mistakes, and standing on shoulders.
Sometimes replicating past behavior is the best you can do. And that is good enough.
There will be time for perfection. There will be mistakes. There will be innovation. You will sharpen. Your methods will sharpen.
Those who came before you — much like you — did the best they could at the time, with the resources and training they had.
You have the opportunity to stand on the backs of giants. To bring HEOR into its next phase of glory.
Make us proud.
— Sanket
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— Sanket
P.S. Hit reply with the question you've never been able to ask anywhere else. I read every one.