Biopharma Trends in 2024 and Beyond

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The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), mergers and acquisitions, obesity-control drugs, and artificial intelligence (AI) dominated the pharma industry’s headlines in 2023. And although they will continue to be a part of industry conversations, there are five major trends poised to occupy centerstage in 2024 and beyond:

1. Pharma companies prune portfolio to maximize profitability

2023 saw a few pharma companies spin off their generics businesses into separate companies to focus on their innovative products pipeline. As the IRA puts pressure on pricing, biopharma companies will continue to optimize their portfolios and business strategy in 2024. We anticipate them to focus a lot more on upcoming launches. It is critical they get these launches right. They will make tough decisions on the right go-to-market (GTM) models for their launch products versus those in mature stages and those about to lose exclusivity (LOE). Focus and partnerships will be key to their strategy in 2024 and beyond.

2. Launches make-or-break companies

With 25-275 launches over 2023-27 and about $108 billion in new drug spending in the United States on them, launch success will be critical to company success in 2024. Our study with commercial leaders with deep experience in product launches found five factors are vital to commercial success: payer activation and reimbursement, intelligent and early regulatory engagement, wide adoption by target HCPs, much better field force effectiveness and efficiency, and excellent patient engagement and adoption. Breakthrough companies will bring superior people, process and capabilities to bear across these factors to make launches successful.

3. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) gets to work

While 2023 introduced pharma leaders to GenAI’s possibilities, 2024 is they year they will truly put GenAI to work. Sanofi already announced its responsible AI principles and many others will likely follow suit. Pharma companies will prioritize a few high impact use cases from the many possible, identify the right data sets to enable GenAI, contextualize AI for medical use cases, build required governance models, and validate ROI for enterprise-wide adoption. From clinical to medical to commercial, GenAI promises to drive effectiveness and efficiency across use cases, but domain knowledge and a practitioner perspective would be key to derive value from GenAI.

4. Pharma companies will take steps towards a new GTM model

Pharma GTM models are still stuck in a pre-COVID world with a digital veneer on it. We swung the pendulum from fully-rep-led to fully-digital launches and missed the bus on enabling the field force with digital channels and experiences. The future is hybrid. Pharma companies will evolve their GTM models in 2024. Companies that seamlessly integrate their agency of record (AOR), contract sales organization (CSO) and direct-to-consumer (DTC) partners together will forge ahead of others. This truly omnichannel experience is vital to engaging HCPs and patients and ensure success in the future.

5. GBS partners with service providers to drive value and innovation

An Everest Group study across industries found 48% of enterprise respondents expecting to shift to a shared services or global business services (GBS) sourcing model. Biopharma has been slow to adopt this model. However, as GBS transitions from capacity to capability centers and enterprises’ expectations from GBS evolves from cost productivity to augmenting technology capabilities and strategic process re-engineering, pharma GBS centers will increasingly partner with specialist service providers to augment and elevate inhouse capabilities.

As the pharma industry rebalanced its priorities post-COVID in 2023, 2024 promises to be the year when it builds on its resilience and accelerates the development of core capabilities necessary to drive sustainable, profitable growth in the future.

About the Author

Gaurav Kapoor, EVP, Indegene.