Insights
How the hard commercial questions actually get answered.
Working notes from the team behind the engine: competitive intelligence, rare-disease sizing, access and field strategy.
Competitive Intelligence
Featured · 5 min read
How to Buy a Competitive-Intelligence Brief That Changes a Decision
Most pharma CI spend buys capability, a dashboard or a subscription, not the answer to a specific question. Four tests separate a competitive-intelligence brief you can act on from one you file.
Naresh Gupta · 2026-07-22
commercial-planning · 6 min read
Four Ways to Get a Pharma Commercial Question Answered, Compared
A general AI assistant, a syndicated report, a consulting firm or an AI-native engine: four routes to a pharma commercial answer, what each gives you, and when each is the right choice.
commercial-planning
commercial-planning · 6 min read
The One-Time Cure Sells to a Backlog, Then a Trickle
A one-time gene therapy sells to the patients who already have the diagnosis, and once that backlog is treated, to almost no one. Novartis' own CEO called it a bolus. It is why chronic-drug forecasting misreads the gene-therapy opportunity.
commercial-planning
commercial-planning · 6 min read
The Biggest Number in a Rare-Disease Forecast Is the One No One Has Counted
In most rare diseases the diagnosed population is a fraction of the true one, so a forecast anchored to who is coded today understates the market that exists. ATTR amyloidosis shows why the undiagnosed pool is not a caveat on the number. It is the number.
commercial-planning
commercial-planning · 6 min read
One Rare Disease, Several Markets: Why Segmentation Comes Before Sizing
A single rare-disease indication looks like one market and behaves like several. Genotype, organ, or antibody status splits the population into groups that cannot be added together. Sizing the indication as one number counts patients no single therapy can reach.
commercial-planning
commercial-planning · 7 min read
Rare Disease in the Gulf: Where Patient Identification Is a Policy Decision
In the Gulf, consanguinity enlarges the recessive-disease pool and state-run screening turns patient identification into a policy lever a forecaster can read. It is a distinct market, not a scaled-down Western one, and modelling it as the latter gets the number wrong in both directions.
commercial-planning
commercial-planning · 6 min read
Sizing a Disease You Catch at Birth: What Newborn Screening Does to the Forecast
When a rare disease enters a newborn-screening panel, it stops being a prevalent pool to penetrate and becomes an incident flow plus a depleting backlog. Market size becomes a function of screening coverage, a policy variable, not epidemiology.
Market Access
Market Access · 6 min read
Why Ultra-Orphan Pricing Breaks the Standard Value Tools
A rare-disease price of hundreds of thousands a year, or a gene therapy in the millions, does not fit the cost-effectiveness thresholds built for common disease. The HTA bodies have conceded it by writing a separate rulebook, and for a one-time cure the payment model breaks too.
commercial-planning
commercial-planning · 7 min read
What Makes Rare Disease Attractive Is What Makes It Hard to Analyze
Rare disease is the most attractive place in pharma to launch a drug, and one of the hardest to size. Both facts have the same cause: a small, hidden, genetic population. Which is why you do not measure a rare-disease market. You build one.
Competitive Intelligence
Competitive Intelligence · 6 min read
IgA Nephropathy: Five Drugs, No Sequence, and the CI Problem in the Launch Wave
IgA nephropathy went from supportive care only to five approved drugs across four mechanisms in four years. The competitive question has inverted: no longer which drug is best, but where each fits in a treatment sequence no guideline has written.
commercial-planning
commercial-planning · 7 min read
Field-Force Sizing: Three Methods, and How to Pick the Right One
Field-force sizing is where commercial spend concentrates — and the wrong method burns it. The three sizing approaches, and how a drug's commercial archetype decides which one is right.