Adapting a Product Development Partnership to New Challenges

Our client is an industry leader with a long history of developing safe and effective therapeutics for patients with neglected tropical diseases (NTDs). The client set an ambitious plan to add between 15 and 18 new treatments by 2028. For our client, this growth represented a 100% increase from its portfolio over the previous eight years. To achieve this long-term strategic objective, it was imperative for the organization to reorganize its approach to access, build up new capabilities, and to embrace new approaches and tools in dealing with the access bottlenecks at the country-level. 

The Problem

Neglected tropical diseases are a diverse group of preventable and treatable diseases that are mainly prevalent in tropical areas, where they mostly affect impoverished communities and disproportionately affect women and children. These diseases have devastating health, social and economic consequences for more than one billion people.

There is widespread recognition that traditional market have failed to deliver innovation for the billions of people at risk of NTDs, due to a lack of investment in the product pipeline. PDPs have played an important role in improving the funding and accelerating development of novel and much needed interventions to address issues of global health, especially for poor and disadvantaged populations. PDPs have the ability to bring together partners from academia, industry, the public sector and multilateral agencies to develop effective, affordable, appropriate and accessible products. Similarly, they have stimulated a greater commitment by the pharmaceutical industry to collaborate on these diseases of poverty.

The Solution

Market Access Africa was commissioned to provide technical and surge support for the organization, in a time when it was increasing its operational functions and focusing on addressing significant efficiency gaps in its global access work. 

By working closely with senior management, product teams, and regional offices, we were able to lead a set of initiatives to bring improvements and greater efficiency. These initiatives included redesigning the global access operational structure by establishing a new transversal project team structure to eliminate entrenched organizational silos. In addition, we standardized internal tools and frameworks for market access planning and create uniformity across the disease portfolio. We supported impact measurement improvements, provide targeted expertise on market-shaping efforts and country-level product roll-out.

Our work also extended to revamping the organization’s governance structure for access projects by bringing in new external members and creating clear decision points at every stage, from brainstorming and design through to implementation.

The Outcome

With our support, the organization is now well on its way to achieving its commitment to improving the quality of life and helping poor communities to thrive.