Periodic Reporting for period 1 - MIOPIC (Measuring Illegal Online Pharmacies' Impact and Co-evolution)
Période du rapport: 2023-05-01 au 2024-10-31
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).
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).
The following are the main activities performed and the achievements each one represents. We distinguish between the technological and the commercial activities implemented throughout the project:
Technological activities:
a. Prototype development: We integrated all the codes and algorithms developed in the associated ERC Starting Grant (ILLEGALPHARMA) into a single cloud-based software architecture to develop our prototype. This prototype allows for the generation of data and business intelligence around the activities of IOPs in a monthly basis.
b. Prototype Testing & Validation. The resulting prototype was tested and validated through a pilot with a final end-user. The feedback obtained allowed to redesign certain aspects and adapt the data generation processes to the current market needs.
c. Web Service Development. A web-based service is being developed to facilitate the distribution of the data and services provided around the final technology. The goal of this web service is to facilitate the customization of the data/services provided to end-users and to provide several visualization and download options to final users.
Commercial activities:
a. IPRs Assessment. IPRs around the technologies developed have been secured. A plan to protect those IPRs has been designed and put in place (e.g. data storage, technical team’s responsibilities, confidentiality agreements).
b. End-user Interest Assessment. Relationships have been established to evaluate commercial interest by potential end-users. These relationships have allowed us to tailor the services/products offered to end-users’ current needs.
c. Go-to-Market Design. A spin-off from the host institution has been founded. A business plan has been developed to provide a path for the commercial exploitation of the services developed in this project.
Technological activities:
a. Prototype development: We integrated all the codes and algorithms developed in the associated ERC Starting Grant (ILLEGALPHARMA) into a single cloud-based software architecture to develop our prototype. This prototype allows for the generation of data and business intelligence around the activities of IOPs in a monthly basis.
b. Prototype Testing & Validation. The resulting prototype was tested and validated through a pilot with a final end-user. The feedback obtained allowed to redesign certain aspects and adapt the data generation processes to the current market needs.
c. Web Service Development. A web-based service is being developed to facilitate the distribution of the data and services provided around the final technology. The goal of this web service is to facilitate the customization of the data/services provided to end-users and to provide several visualization and download options to final users.
Commercial activities:
a. IPRs Assessment. IPRs around the technologies developed have been secured. A plan to protect those IPRs has been designed and put in place (e.g. data storage, technical team’s responsibilities, confidentiality agreements).
b. End-user Interest Assessment. Relationships have been established to evaluate commercial interest by potential end-users. These relationships have allowed us to tailor the services/products offered to end-users’ current needs.
c. Go-to-Market Design. A spin-off from the host institution has been founded. A business plan has been developed to provide a path for the commercial exploitation of the services developed in this project.
The services offered are likely to be of interest to different stakeholders in the pharma industry, such as research institutions, industry associations, pharmaceutical companies, regulators, healthcare organizations, and law enforcement authorities. Therefore, the impact of this Proof of Concept can be described in the following three dimensions:
1. Scientific impact: This project improves our understanding of the activities of IOPs. Available data is clearly inferior to the one we provide. On the one hand, available data on active IOPs does not provide information about IOPs’ network structure, nor is it updated frequently enough over time. In addition, data on drug sales from IOPs is based on industry-level aggregated estimates that are temporally imprecise and likely biased. Hence, the knowledge generated by our data/services represents a substantive improvement relative to the current state of the art.
2. Economic impact. Key stakeholders in the pharma industry, like pharmaceutical companies and pharmacy chains, need information about IOP activities in order to understand why customers decide to shift to IOPs to access their medications. With the data and services generated in this project, it is possible to develop knowledge on the drivers of IOP sales that will help these organizations design more effective customer acquisition and retention strategies. This knowledge may also help agencies design educational campaigns alerting about the risks associated with illegal medications.
3. Social impact. It is broadly acknowledged that IOPs represent a significant public health threat. Medicines sold through IOPs often lead to severe if not lethal outcomes. The data and analytics provided by our web service may help regulators and healthcare organizations better assess the magnitude of the problem posed by IOPs and design more effective solutions against them. Moreover, it may be used by law enforcement authorities as well, to track IOPs activities over time and assess the effectiveness of their different enforcement and prosecution strategies.
1. Scientific impact: This project improves our understanding of the activities of IOPs. Available data is clearly inferior to the one we provide. On the one hand, available data on active IOPs does not provide information about IOPs’ network structure, nor is it updated frequently enough over time. In addition, data on drug sales from IOPs is based on industry-level aggregated estimates that are temporally imprecise and likely biased. Hence, the knowledge generated by our data/services represents a substantive improvement relative to the current state of the art.
2. Economic impact. Key stakeholders in the pharma industry, like pharmaceutical companies and pharmacy chains, need information about IOP activities in order to understand why customers decide to shift to IOPs to access their medications. With the data and services generated in this project, it is possible to develop knowledge on the drivers of IOP sales that will help these organizations design more effective customer acquisition and retention strategies. This knowledge may also help agencies design educational campaigns alerting about the risks associated with illegal medications.
3. Social impact. It is broadly acknowledged that IOPs represent a significant public health threat. Medicines sold through IOPs often lead to severe if not lethal outcomes. The data and analytics provided by our web service may help regulators and healthcare organizations better assess the magnitude of the problem posed by IOPs and design more effective solutions against them. Moreover, it may be used by law enforcement authorities as well, to track IOPs activities over time and assess the effectiveness of their different enforcement and prosecution strategies.