How Should Pharmaceutical Companies Rethink Commercialization and Distribution Strategies?

In a conversation with Pharmaceutical Executive, Jay Bregman, CEO and co-founder of Andel, discusses the potential impact of the FDA's increased scrutiny on non-FDA approved GLP-1 products, particularly on the competitive landscape for obesity and diabetes therapies.

Bregman believes the FDA's action is overdue, as it will likely lead to a crackdown on compounders and affect 1.5 million users of compounded drugs. The discussion also touches on the need for new distribution strategies for pharmaceutical companies and digital health platforms, emphasizing the importance of compliance and legitimate branded drugs.

A transcript of Bregman’s conversation with Pharmaceutical Executive can be found below.

Pharmaceutical Executive: How should pharmaceutical companies and digital health platforms rethink their commercialization or distribution strategies?
Jay Bregman: The question about compliance is really about two things. One, it's about providing legitimate, branded drugs, and the second, is how do you market those drugs?

Traditionally you saw in the beginning that pharmaceutical companies were marketing directly to doctors. That's now subsided. Now they're putting ads in the subway in New York City. Why? I don't know.

But basically, they must feel there is some return on investment, the Super Bowl, all these mass market advertisements. I think there's a huge, missed opportunity.

The natural place for employees to gain information about their pharmacy plan and their drug plan, their health plan, is through their employers. In the United States that is the optimal place for them to be positioning themselves in terms of offering their drug at keener prices, and basically we see that happening in the next part of this year and into next year, as people realize that these mass market, you know, kind of moonshot advertisements, while great, are just simply not effective and very expensive.

Pharmaceutical Executive: What impact could tighter regulatory oversight have on patient access, pricing dynamics, and healthcare providers’ prescribing decisions?
Jay Bregman: I think the market is going to have to find new and legitimate ways to be able to serve these customers, and I think the legitimate ways are to find out if it's not just a single payer as an individual, and it's not just an employer paying the entire load, it's going to have to be some hybrid of the two.

So we believe in Andel that there will be a new type of system where employers will pay a portion, a contribution to cash pay purchases on the part of the employees, and that will allow these employees that were previously using compounding to gain access to legitimate branded drugs, a way that gives employers full access to the data of the use of these drugs to make sure that their dollars are being spent on legitimate, branded drugs and not copycat.