The Challenge: When Speed Meets Thoroughness at a Crossroads
Portfolio Strategy and Business Development teams in pharma operate at the intersection of massive opportunity and impossible timelines. They're responsible for scouting, evaluating, negotiating, and executing partnerships or licensing agreements—decisions worth hundreds of millions of dollars that can define a company's competitive position for years.
The challenge? Each opportunity evaluation required approximately 550 hours of manual effort to produce a single comprehensive report. Teams needed to:
- Understand market dynamics and treatment paradigms
- Identify and analyze all clinical and marketed competitor drugs
- Deep-dive into pipeline assets across multiple development stages
- Conduct competitive benchmarking against dozens of players
- Assess Target Product Profile (TPP) proximity
- Estimate eligible patient populations
- Project market access across geographies
- Forecast market size and share potential
With therapy areas evolving rapidly and competitive intelligence becoming stale within months, Business Development and Licensing (BD&L) teams faced an impossible choice: evaluate fewer opportunities thoroughly, or spread resources thin and risk missing critical insights that could derail a deal months into negotiations.
One major pharma company's BD&L leader put it bluntly: "We're leaving opportunities on the table - not because they aren't valuable, but because we can't evaluate them fast enough before someone else does."
The Solution: AI-Backed Intelligence Without Sacrificing Rigor
Evalueserve developed a modular, AI-powered Commercial Excellence solution specifically designed for pharma Portfolio Strategy and BD&L teams. The approach combined deep domain expertise with intelligent automation to accelerate the most time-intensive elements of opportunity assessment.
The solution deployed AI agents to handle:
Market intelligence gathering
Automated identification of clinical and marketed drugs, cutting research time by 60%.
Pipeline asset analysis
Deep-dive competitor analysis with structured data extraction, reducing effort by 53%.
Competitive benchmarking
Systematic comparison across multiple dimensions, achieving 40% time savings.
Patient population estimation
Rapid epidemiological analysis, cutting effort in half.
Treatment paradigm mapping
Accelerated landscape analysis, reducing effort by 50%.
Market sizing
Automated data synthesis for share and size projections, saving 40% of effort.
Critically, the solution maintained the thoroughness and accuracy BD&L teams required: AI handled data aggregation and initial structuring while domain experts focused on insight generation, strategic implications, and recommendation development.
The modular approach meant each component could serve different stakeholders across the pharma value chain, creating flexibility as priorities shifted.
The Impact: 27% Faster Evaluation, 5+ Therapy Areas in Reach
The initial proof-of-concept demonstrated 25-30% efficiency gains, reducing a typical opportunity report from 550 hours to approximately 400 hours. The client saw:
- Revenue from one therapy area: $250K+
- Margin profile: 55%+
- Expansion potential: 5 additional therapy areas identified.
- Speed advantage: Ability to evaluate significantly more opportunities within the same resource envelope.
On top of that, BD&L teams reported:
- Faster response to competitive threats - Reduced lag time between identifying emerging opportunities and delivering actionable intelligence.
- More opportunities evaluated - Same team could now assess a greater pipeline of potential deals.
- Higher confidence in decisions - Comprehensive analysis maintained quality while accelerating delivery
The solution's modular design created immediate value in a single therapy area while establishing a scalable platform. Each new therapy area added became progressively faster to deploy.
Perhaps most importantly, BD&L teams could finally say "yes" to evaluating promising opportunities they would have previously declined due to bandwidth constraints, transforming their function from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.
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Overview & Impact
AI-powered Commercial Excellence accelerates pharma BD&L opportunity evaluations, combining automation and domain expertise to cut research time, maintain rigor, and expand coverage across multiple therapy areas.
