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Case Study #1 – Who Are our Competitors and What Is the Current Status of their Projects?

Big (bio)pharma competitive intelligence teams have a pretty good idea about this question. They spend huge US$/€/£ amounts in very nice, interactive business/scientific/IP intelligence databases and have access to vast libraries of reports, and the answer to the question is at fingertip reach.

For cash-hungry biotechs/biopharmas, the question is much more complicated to answer, as most do not have access to these costly resources. Very often, Google is the standard, but this “zero-cost”-like approach appears to be time-consuming (thus highly costly) and surprisingly does not guarantee exhaustive coverage, despite the tons of results returned to a request. When we designed www.biotech-intelligence.com, we had in mind these companies and one of our goals was to offer a user-friendly and time-saving access to global life sciences industries information, at a reasonable price.

Direct and Indirect Competition Awareness

As Edmund M. Oliver of Oxford Bioscience Partners, - a prominent Boston, Ma.-based Venture Capital Fund - told the attendance at a conference for biotech entrepreneurs in Institut Pasteur, Paris, a couple of years ago, one of the most common reason for failure in start-ups is lack of worldwide competitive information – direct and indirect. www.biotech-intelligence.com, thanks to its specific design, offers a fingertip access to this kind of information.

Competition Identification

Let’s assume you are in charge of business intelligence – among other responsibilities - in a small-sized biotech which intends to develop a pre-clinical stage drug-candidate addressing Type 1 Diabetes (Juvenile Diabetes). Your CEO would like to have an update of competition, before meeting potential investors. If you google “type 1 diabetes”, you get approximately 3.500.000 results. Needless to say that you will spend a couple of days exploring these web pages, and CEOs can be impatient. Now consider using www.biotech-intelligence.com. After logging in, you would launch the same request via the embedded text-mining software, and get 1.437 results (eg industry announcements containing “Type 1 Diabetes”).

Next screenshot displays what you see after launching the request. Three lists appear on top of results. The left one (Sources) is the most interesting in this case: it contains the names of the companies involved in this particular indication. You have identified your competitive/partnering landscape in a couple of seconds!

Results of a request to identify companies involved in Type 1 Diabetes (see Sources)

Competition’s R&D Identification and Status

Let’s go now one step beyond, and identify competitors’ development programs and clinical/regulatory status. You would use the same words “type 1 diabetes” and a tag which means that you are looking for (pre)clinical development related news (in this case “dbpc”). Now the request returns 176 results (from 01/01/08 – you are looking for recent news). All news in results announce (pre)clinical developments in this particular indication. From this information, you (or an intern) can build a pipeline within a few hours.

Results for (pre)clinical development news

First three results(out of 176 since 01/01/08 for (pre)clinical development programs in Type 1 Diabetes