The pharmaceutical industry strongly relies on data for strategic decision-making. This data is provided by a few organizations to the different key players in the pharma industry (e.g. manufacturers, distributors, research companies, and regulators). The pharma analytics market generated around $60B in revenues in 2021 and is expected to grow at a 20% annual rate in the coming years.
One type of data that is particularly demanded is data on drug consumption. Having precise knowledge about drug sales over time is a fundamental input that guides decision-making in the pharma industry. Manufacturers need this information to assess their drugs’ market potential, understand their drug’s performance relative to competing drugs, develop forecasts, and make budget allocation decisions. Similarly, regulators use this data to understand the benefits and risks of different treatments.
However, there is a growing concern about sales data provided by pharma analytics suppliers: it includes drug sales from legal pharmacies but not from illegal pharmacies. The sale of medicines by illegal pharmacies (mainly operating online) has grown in the last years. This means that current pharma analytics companies’ data is myopic: measures of drug sales are biased and incomplete since they miss a significant portion of the market. This poses a fundamental problem to pharma companies and regulators who rely on this data in their daily activities: using data that only accounts for the legal side of the market provides an incomplete picture of drug consumption and is, therefore, likely to lead to suboptimal decisions. The problem is that data about illegal online pharmacies’ (IOPs) sales is unavailable due to the obscure nature of these pharmacies’ operations.
The aim of this Proof of Concept is to address this limitation by providing data and business analytics on IOPs’ drug sales. The business model will be based on licensing and subscription agreements, following a pay-per-use structure (subscription fee is proportional to the amount of data demanded). The data that will feed this service will come from the algorithms developed by the ILLEGALPHARMA ERC-funded project. In this project, a methodology was developed to estimate monthly drug sales from IOPs in the United States (U.S.) the largest consumer of illegal medicines.
The content and business intelligence provided will resolve the problem described above faced by pharma companies, research institutions, and regulators. Combining our data on IOPs sales with the data on legal sales provided by existing suppliers will outline a richer picture that will help these organizations optimize their decision-making. Moreover, it is important to highlight that these players are not only interested in understanding illegal sales dynamics for strategic decision-making purposes, but also because it poses a fundamental threat for all of them (e.g. IOPs represent a revenue loss for pharma companies and a public health threat for regulators and healthcare systems). Thus, data on IOPs drug sales is also helpful to (a) assess the nature and magnitude of this threat and (b) assess the effectiveness of the measures these stakeholders are implementing to fight these illicit activities (e.g. pharma companies’ consumer education campaigns and law enforcement authorities’ attempts to shut down IOPs).
