Year: 2017-18

Company: Pfizer

Liaison(s): Bonnie Vlahos, William Ports

Pfizer Inc. has worked for over 150 years to provide populations world-wide with safe, efficacious, affordable, and high-quality pharmaceuticals. Pfizer strives to bring needed therapies to patients that will hopefully improve their everyday lives. In recent years, Pfizer has developed a topical product that has met these goals for patients diagnosed with a specific inflammatory skin disease. Because of the high cost required to bring new products to market, pharmaceutical companies such as Pfizer create comprehensive Life Cycle Management strategies to optimally extend the potential of the product. This will not only maximize a product’s commercial success, but more importantly, bring benefits to additional patient populations. Pfizer’s Life Cycle Management strategies for this product includes evaluating the expansion of its label to include other inflammatory skin diseases. The Pfizer Life Cycle Proposal team was tasked with a two-phase project: 1) evaluating two current opportunities Pfizer is exploring, and 2) recommending novel opportunities for future consideration.

In phase one, the team focused on evaluating two opportunities Pfizer had already identified as potential product line extensions for their current topical product. This phase involved performing thorough literature searches on the proposals to build a reference repository, preparing materials for advisory board meetings, and formulating critiques of proposed clinical trial designs. In phase two, the team created a scoring system to identify possible new opportunities to recommend for further analysis. This system was designed to evaluate the desirability of specific opportunities that could be suitable market opportunities, taking into account clinical, regulatory and business merits.