About ME
Kasia Hein-Peters, MD - Advisor and Board Member
I partner with life science and digital health startup companies to help them better understand their healthcare ecosystem and design successful commercialization strategies.
Kasia Hein-Peters, MD
Advisor and Board Member
I joined the industry out of a passion for improving patient outcomes. I have first-hand experience in launching new classes of medications, which profoundly changed the standards of care: first SSRI antidepressant, first echinocandin antifungal, first cervical cancer vaccine, and first dengue vaccine. In addition, I launched several other medications, vaccines, and medical devices. Over the years, I saw how significant impact most of these innovations had on people’s lives and how deeply they changed how we practice medicine today.
I also saw several up-and-coming innovations, which were unsuccessful. As a result, companies lost money, and patients never fully benefited from new solutions. According to studies, failures may be more common than you think – 75% of startups don’t succeed, and more than 90% of technical inventions are unsuccessful. Typical mistakes include:
- Poor understanding of the ecosystem, especially the role and influence of various stakeholder groups (e.g., thought leaders, payers, medical and patient advocacy organizations), resulted from insufficient customer insights and market intelligence.
- Alienating stakeholders who are skeptical of the company data or strategy.
- Poor internal preparedness beyond the first few launch countries.
- Limited medical affairs presence before launch, preventing a proper market development.
- Inadequate product profile because of an insufficient clinical development program, which was meant to get regulatory approval but does not support a strong value proposition.
- Not well-established pricing process, resulting in too high or too low price at launch.
- Late and limited outcomes research and real-world evidence studies lead to the limited adoption by payers due to insufficient data to support health technology assessments.
- Lack of fast feedback loops built into the launch plan, resulting in the inability to adjust the strategy once new market intelligence becomes available.
- Heavy reliance on traditional channels without exploring omnichannel communication.
- And finally, an overblown forecast (assuming too high or too fast adoption) creates unrealistic expectations. The feeling of failure may be dissociated from the realities of the market, where the product is doing quite well, considering existing barriers to entry.
I believe that in the coming years, launches will be even more challenging because of changes that we already see, such as budgets constrained due to the pandemic and reduction of face-to-face visits for patients. These changes will lead to fewer opportunities to add new medications to formularies and reimbursement lists and change medication during patient visits. As a result, more successful new drugs will be the ones addressing high unmet medical needs and having very well-articulated value propositions, or simply saving costs to the system.