Case Study: Immune Checkpoint Inhibitors

Project Background

Client

• The client is a biopharma firm based in Boston and is developing novel therapies to treat different types of cancer indications. Within the field of immunotherapy, one of the client’s focus areas is development of immune checkpoint inhibitors.
• As a part of its strategic plan, the client was looking to grow, either through collaborations or acquisitions, to strengthen its development pipeline and drive synergies between different research programs. In fact, it is worth highlighting that the intent to evaluate concurrent combinatorial therapies has already led to several clinical trial collaborations, mainly between developers of competing or complementary immuno-oncology therapies.

Objective

• To identify active players in the immune checkpoint inhibitors market, track deals and partnerships established between these players in the last 7-8 years.
• Create a comprehensive database of each collaboration covering detailed information on identified deals. Such collaborations have actively facilitated the growth in the market by providing a common platform to pharma giants along with newer players.
• Prioritize and recommend potential opportunities for future collaboration based on specific parameters such as nature of the molecule, type of target and indications under investigation.

Project Approach

Project Outcome

Deliverable

• An Excel database of all the relevant deals that have taken place across different stakeholders over the last ten years. The database covered the year of partnerships, type of partnerships, stakeholders involved and summarized technical details for all partnerships. In addition, the data highlighted commercial insights related to the deal value (in the form of upfront, milestone and royalty payments) and associated variance governed by the deal type, time period and the extent of role played by each stakeholder in a specific deal.
• A PowerPoint presentation to highlight the deal / partnership trends governing the market. Amongst others, this included insights on the most important / popular deal model (product licensing, co-development, co-commercialization, clinical trial collaboration, research collaboration and others) and the preferred targets for combination therapies.
• A financial model to determine the various possible deal structures resulting in the desired Net Present Value over a defined period of time.

Outcome

• In addition to evaluating multiple factors, our insights helped the client evaluate attractiveness of specific targets to identify potential future partners.
• The CFO, who was in the middle of several deal discussions, was armed with credible data related to similar deals that had taken place in the past; this enabled her to strengthen the case for negotiation with potential partners.
• The insights pack offered her targeted guidance in terms of what she should strive to achieve and the possible best-case deal scenario in her favour.
• The financial model, equipped with multi-variate sensitivity analysis, allowed her to regularly value various deal structures and quickly respond to the deal partner(s).