AI Services for Life Sciences Companies and the Drug Launch Stage

AI Services for Life Sciences Companies: Pharma Product Launches

Launching a new medicinal drug on the market is initiated long before the actual launch date. Medicines are typically introduced to the market via a carefully crafted plan tailored to target market conditions, reimbursement policies, and territory-specific pricing conditions. A pharma product launch strategy has several elements to ensure readiness for the market and stakeholders. Some essential aspects of commercial launch excellence are:

• Key Opinion Leader (KOL) programs with advisory board consultations and events where trust is built around the product and the influence of Key Opinion Leaders. These programs and events can benefit product promotion and prescribing patterns.
• Training programs for all employees involved in a product launch, ensuring they understand the product and its competitors.
• Data integration to enable adjustments of launch programs and ensure the product meets expectations.
• Patient engagement to capture patient feedback, inform marketing, and launch campaigns with patient perspectives.
• Performance metrics to enable oversight and evaluation of marketing and communication strategies.
• Social media strategy for dissemination to a broad audience and garnering valuable feedback.

Language Strategy AI Services for Life Sciences Companies

Early engagement can secure a strong global communication platform for a new drug in its initial marketing stage. Our initial blog pointed to the Target Product Profile (TPP). The TPP is often created in the early drug development stages to outline the desired commercial drug profile. A drug sponsor should involve payers and patient representatives as the TPP is being developed. The sponsor should be clear on the drug’s key endpoints and value proposition. Launching a drug product is a complex process. Stakeholders are multilingual, and the patient journey is complex.

The Deloitte Center for Health Solutions states that end-to-end strategic planning is essential to a successful product launch. According to the report, a third of all drugs launched in a five-year period in the US failed to meet market expectations during their first year. Around 70% of products missing expectations at launch will continue to underperform. Unmet medical needs drive product performance. However, communication and stakeholder engagement also play a central role in product adoption, conversion, and positioning. A language and localization strategy should be part of a global product launch strategy. This additional strategy will ensure product messaging is accurate, consistent, and tailored to different markets and customer segments, including:

• Patients
• Caregivers
• Physicians
• Payers
• Institutional buyers

The language strategy should include more than translations. It needs to account for nuances in style, terminology, and readability.  All these items help accommodate different stakeholders and communication contexts.

Opportunities and Challenges with Language AI for Launch Excellence

AI should be considered an option for facilitating language outcomes during launch execution. This will be safe and effective if risks are controlled and the content used for launch communication is set up in appropriate language workflows. Large Language Models can benefit global launch programs, especially if language assets are leveraged from pre-market stage. This not only optimizes language service execution during launch, but also enables language consistency in the product positioning. The messaging and commercial positioning of the drug product starts taking shape during the investigational drug’s development and the evolution of clinical data, documentation, and labeling claims. Setting up a life cycle AI language strategy from the pre-market stage enables transfer of language assets from R&D to the launch stage. It also drives efficiencies and cost savings. Critically, it can help solve challenges of inconsistent product messaging that may arise from siloed pharma enterprise structures and a lack of transition of language assets from pre-market to launch stage. Beyond cost-savings, these are the key opportunities of AI:

• Translation and language service efficiencies
• Ability to process large content volumes in support of simultaneous multiregional launch programs
• Leveraging language assets from pre-market stage to obtain language consistency in positioning and narratives for the product
• Social media listening to capture sentiment and reputation forming around the product at launch
• AI-powered multilingual eLearning for training programs for different employee groups
• Readability testing for plain language content intended for patients, caregivers, and other non-technical stakeholders

Get in touch

Need pharmaceutical translation services? Ready to harness AI and Life Sciences localization services for your drug development life cycle? Lionbridge has decades of experience providing life sciences content translation and solutions for every touchpoint in your journey, including AI and life sciences language solutions. Let’s get in touch.