Reading adoption risk before launch in an established treatment field

A new mechanism of action was preparing to enter a rare metabolic disorder where the standard of care had years of clinical trust behind it. On paper, the new therapy compared well. In practice, the launch team was walking into a field where familiarity itself was the competition.

The hard part was not the data. It was behaviour. Patients stable on existing treatment did not automatically read a new option as a better one, and switching carries a perceived risk that a favourable clinical profile alone does not resolve. Nor was it clear how much influence patients themselves held over the decision, or where the line ran between patients likely to switch and treatment-naive patients who would start fresh on either option.

We began with the landscape: how the existing standard of care is actually prescribed today, by whom, and on what grounds. Against that baseline we read early perception of the new therapy among physicians and patients, ahead of any formal launch messaging, separating genuine clinical enthusiasm from caution rooted in familiarity.

From there we isolated the real drivers and barriers to prescribing, for new starts and for switches separately, and measured directly how much weight patients carry in the decision.

The patient population did not behave as one audience. It separated into patients likely to switch, treatment-naive patients starting fresh, and patients expected to remain on current treatment, each with its own reasoning. Prescribing drivers and barriers differed between new starts and switches, and patient influence on the decision was greater than the launch team had assumed.

The launch team stopped treating eligibility as one audience. They left with a segmentation to build forecasts and sequencing on, a set of prescribing drivers and barriers separate from the general clinical story, and an early read of patient influence that shaped launch messaging before the first physician conversation took place.