Despite sound science, many recent drug launches are failing. The root cause is not the data but an underinvestment in market conditioning. Cautious investors and tighter budgets mean companies are starting their educational and scientific storytelling efforts too late, failing to prepare the market adequately.

Breakthrough drugs aren't always driven by novel biological targets. Major successes like Humira or GLP-1s often succeeded through a superior modality (a humanized antibody) or a contrarian bet on a market (obesity). This shows that business and technical execution can be more critical than being the first to discover a biological mechanism.

The commercial success curve of a new drug is locked in within the first six to nine months post-launch. After this point, market perceptions are set, and additional investment yields diminishing returns. A rapid, real-time feedback loop is crucial for course-correction *during* this make-or-break period.

Progress in drug development often hides inside failures. A therapy that fails in one clinical trial can provide critical scientific learnings. One company leveraged insights from a failed study to redesign a subsequent trial, which was successful and led to the drug's approval.

True innovation in getting drugs to patients is not about pharma creating pricing models alone. It requires a multi-stakeholder partnership where payers, physicians, and manufacturers work together to solve problems for specific patient subgroups. This collaborative effort, not a unilateral one, is what truly saves lives and reduces costs.

With over 5,000 oncology drugs in development and a 9-out-of-10 failure rate, the current model of running large, sequential clinical trials is not viable. New diagnostic platforms are essential to select drugs and patient populations more intelligently and much earlier in the process.

The increasing volume of new therapies requires pharma companies to stop treating each launch as a unique event. Instead, they must develop a scalable, repeatable, and excellent launch capability to handle the future pipeline efficiently and consistently.

Applying traditional, broad primary care launch strategies to highly targeted specialty therapies is a major risk. The complexity of stakeholders and decision-making in areas like oncology means old playbooks can make a company's efforts completely irrelevant.

A primary driver of recent pharma launch failures is underinvestment in pre-launch market conditioning. Cautious investors and tighter budgets mean companies have fewer resources to tell their scientific story effectively before launch. This delayed and underfunded approach has a dramatic negative impact on commercial success.