The Evolution of Pharma Market Research

The past few years have ushered in a seismic shift in the pharmaceutical industry.

From billion-dollar, government-funded research initiatives to a renewed focus on manufacturing new technologies, there’s no shortage of lucrative investment opportunities in every sector of the industry.    

To capitalize on strategic growth, pharma organizations and investors need to stay up to date on the market-moving trends, shifts, and developments that are shaping the industry landscape.

An increasing number of pharma professionals are relying on market intelligence platforms to stay on top of these movements while providing the tools they need to devise a business or investment strategy. 

By taking a more proactive—rather than reactive—approach to research, organizations can leverage better-informed strategies to stay ahead of their competitors.

How Pharmaceutical Market Research Is Changing

Historically, market research methods in the pharmaceutical industry involved relying on historical datasets and manually searching for information from incomplete and disparate sources.

The tedious, time-consuming, and often unreliable process of gathering relevant data points and documents and then separating useful insights from the noise is a herculean task in today’s age of information overload.

Yet, this was the status quo for pharmaceutical and healthcare companies until the advent of technologically advanced market intelligence platforms. These tools turned a monumental task into a cakewalk by exponentially increasing the accuracy, breadth, and depth of conducted research.  

However, it took the COVID-19 pandemic for companies to understand the true value of these tools. As speed became tantamount in the race to solve the public health crisis, traditional methods of research became obsolete. Staying on top of the latest regulatory actions, clinical trials, drug developments, and FDA approvals was an essential component to engineer a vaccine against the virus.

In addition to the sheer volume of information researchers had to wade through, regulatory sites are notoriously difficult to navigate. These factors only made keeping informed and finding answers even more time-consuming. 

In today’s interconnected world, pharma professionals need to understand more than just diseases and treatments. 

The events of the last four years have highlighted the importance of having a solid understanding of global supply chains, remote working trends, sales and marketing constraints, the effectiveness of personal protective equipment, the impact of social distancing on consumer behavior, and much more. 

Today, the best approach to market research is rooted in speed, efficiency, and thoroughness—qualities that are integral in every industry, but none more so than the pharmaceutical space.

That’s why an AI-powered market intelligence platform that not only provides access to all the right data, but also helps you quickly filter out the key insights from the noise, is critical for forward-thinking pharma organizations.

Related Reading: Top Pharma Trends to Watch in 2024

Artificial Intelligence in Pharmaceutical Market Research

Artificial intelligence (AI) is improving not only the quality of results from the market research process, but increasing the speed at which it’s done. AI search technology can quickly extract the relevant market data needed to identify trends and patterns that would otherwise be impossible for humans to detect using manual processes alone.  

Compared to the time and expenses associated with manual research, platforms that leverage AI search technology offer an exponentially higher ROI to any market research process. 

In fact, advancements in AI have even made it possible  to understand the context and purpose behind your search terms. The AlphaSense platform uses machine learning to expand your query, delivering the most relevant results available on your topic using  Smart Synonyms™ technology. 

Whether it’s information about a competitor’s new products, market segmentation, customer insights, pricing benchmarks, or financial performance, market research platforms that utilize the power of AI are revolutionizing strategic planning processes, product development decisions, and investment strategy.

Organizations that transition their market research and competitive intelligence processes onto a market intelligence platform instantly gain a competitive edge, regardless of how they choose to use it.  With a modernized market research process, organizations can easily identify outcomes that matter to different stakeholder groups, gain insights to inform future business decisions, or monitor clinical pipelines with minimal effort.

Conducting Pharmaceutical Market Research With AlphaSense

AlphaSense is a leading market intelligence platform for life sciences professionals and investors. Our platform sets itself apart with its extensive content universe—spanning company documents, expert calls, news and research journals, broker research, and regulatory documents—as well as its proprietary AI search technology.

Here’s how these features work in tandem with an extensive content universe to level up the market research process for pharma professionals:

Aggregated Content Universe

AlphaSense’s comprehensive content library draws from more than 10,000 high-quality content sources, offering both quantitative and qualitative global market research data. By providing timely, reliable insights, the AlphaSense platform can help you make faster, more-informed business decisions.

The following examples are just a few of the different types of industry-specific content that’s accessible in the AlphaSense platform:

• Healthcare industry news, pharmaceutical company reports, statistical data, and industry publications from authoritative sources like the World Health Organization and the US National Library of Medicine
• A vast library of regulatory healthcare content from ClinicalTrials.gov, FDA, EMA, PubMed, and more
• Exclusive equity research and analysis from Wall Street Insights®, a premier market research tool for corporate teams and healthcare professionals
• Primary research that includes over 40,000 expert call transcripts from interviews with doctors, patients, medical researchers, pharmaceutical companies, healthcare industry leaders, and more

Semantic Search

AlphaSense’s proprietary AI search technology recognizes the intent of your search and surfaces key insights without you having to perform multiple manual searches or spending time reading through the entirety of long documents. 

Our Smart Synonyms™ technology analyzes speech patterns across tens of millions of search documents, resulting in a robust library of synonymous words. AlphaSense does the heavy lifting of searching for your query, as well as all relevant synonyms, within text-heavy documents.

Sentiment Analysis

Our sentiment analysis technology utilizes natural language processing (NLP) to uncover market perceptions about a given topic. Further, it color-codes positive and negative sentiment for easy recognition as you browse search results. These AI features are executed in seconds, saving analysts precious hours that were previously spent combing through broker reports and other complex healthcare market research.

Generative AI

Unlike other consumer-grade generative AI (genAI) tools trained on publicly available data, AlphaSense takes an entirely different approach. Our industry-leading suite of generative AI tools is purpose-built to deliver business-grade insights and leans on 10+ years of AI tech development. 

Our suite of tools currently includes:

• Smart Summaries – This feature allows you to glean instant earnings insights—reducing time spent on research during earnings season, quickly capture company outlook, and generate an expert-approved SWOT analysis straight from former competitors, partners, and employees.
• Enterprise Intelligence – This is a first-of-its-kind knowledge management offering that delivers AlphaSense’s AI-powered search and summarization capabilities to customers’ internal organizational knowledge.
• AlphaSense Assistant (in beta) – Assistant is a generative AI chat experience that transforms how users can extract insights from hundreds of millions of premium content sources.

Our pharma and biotech customers use our generative AI capabilities to:

• Extract guidance
• Summarize most important insights
• Extract sentiment
• Summarize and rank positives and negatives
• Extract KPIs
• Validate KPI accuracy in summary

Related Reading: Accelerating Pharma Research With AI (Complete Guide)

Modern Pharma Market Research in Action

But how do these features help pharma professionals and investors conduct quicker, deeper research and feel more confident in their work?

Clinical Pipeline Tracking

AlphaSense makes it easy to track and analyze clinical pipelines with aggregated access to regulatory healthcare content from ClinicalTrials.gov, FDA, EMA, PubMed, and more. Our advanced filtering features allow you to get straight to the right types of content for your specific research needs. Instead of sifting through entire documents, let AlphaSense find the insights most pertinent to your search query.

Disease Landscaping 

Perform a more comprehensive competitor pipeline analysis and disease research to ensure you never miss out on updates with AI-powered company recognition and Search Summaries. Our platform can gather the context behind your quantitative research, so you can focus on developing an effective go-to-market strategy and take your product development to the next level.

Earnings Analysis

You can analyze earnings transcripts in a more strategic, in-depth way by using AlphaSense’s sentiment analysis technology and Search Summaries. The former allows you to uncover shifts in commentary on relevant companies and topics, while the latter helps you develop a full-scale understanding of an industry by surfacing emerging topics from sector leaders, competitors initiatives, and company KPIs. 

Trend Forecasting

Pharma industry trends evolve on a near-constant basis, making a market intelligence platform that allows you to spot new developments quickly a critical tool. AlphaSense aggregates content from the four key perspectives (company, journalist, analyst, and expert) to help you uncover insights before they’re on anyone else’s radar.

Experience the AlphaSense Difference

Download our Advancing Pharma Research with AI guide to learn the nine ways AI can help you enhance your pharma research processes.

AlphaSense’s extensive content library, proprietary AI search functionality, and market sentiment scoring feature converge to streamline pharma market research. By leveraging our AI and NLP technology, organizations can reduce time and money spent on fruitless market research, and maintain an edge on the competition.

Start your free trial of AlphaSense today.