CASE · OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT
A zoster vaccine in-licensing deal, reopened on better terms.
A mid-sized European specialty pharma · cross-market valuation · European negotiation
01 · THE QUESTION
A mid-sized specialty pharma was in active negotiation to in-license a herpes zoster vaccine from a larger developer. The upfront and milestone structure the licensor had put on the table was anchored in the licensor's own commercial assumptions — built on their view of the European opportunity, their assumptions about uptake, their assumptions about pricing corridors across the EU5 and beyond. The client's commercial and BD teams had an instinct that the number was too high. What they didn't have was an evidence-backed counter-position. They had weeks, not months, to build one.
02 · WHAT WE FOUND
We built the cross-market valuation from the patient up. The epidemiology work surfaced the real eligible population country by country — not the addressable market the licensor was quoting, but the realistic vaccination-eligible cohort after accounting for existing recommendation coverage, co-administration constraints with the flu programme, and the specific commissioning dynamics in each country. Primary research with payers and national immunisation advisory committee members produced a pricing corridor that was materially tighter than the licensor's assumption — and asymmetric across markets in ways their model hadn't captured.
The uptake curves were the decisive input. The licensor had used the shingles vaccine's US trajectory as a template for Europe. We built country-specific curves anchored on actual European precedents — the HPV catch-up programmes, the pneumococcal expansion across the elderly segment — and the ramp was slower, the plateau lower, and the time-to-peak-share longer than the template suggested. Each of those was defensible, traceable to specific evidence, and easy to walk through with a licensor whose negotiators were quantitatively sharp.
03 · WHAT WE DID
We delivered three things. A valuation model that ran the NPV live off the primary assumptions, so any challenge — "what if uptake is faster in Germany?" or "what if the pricing corridor in Spain lands at the top of the range?" — could be pressure-tested in front of the licensor rather than taken offline. A written narrative that walked through each of the major assumption divergences from the licensor's model, with the specific evidence underneath each one. And a negotiation playbook that sequenced which assumptions to raise first, which concessions were low-cost to offer in exchange for structural wins, and where the client should hold the line.
The work ran in parallel with the active negotiation. We sat with the commercial and BD teams through two rounds of counter-proposals, rebuilding the model overnight when the licensor moved their position, and updating the narrative to reflect where the conversation had shifted. The point wasn't to win an argument in a single meeting — it was to equip the client's team to hold a multi-round conversation at the licensor's level of analytical detail.
04 · WHAT CHANGED
The client walked back into the negotiation with a substantively different understanding of the operating environment and the realistic opportunity size. They had a clear floor beneath which the deal didn't make commercial sense, and a clear ceiling above which they were overpaying. The conversation with the licensor re-opened on terms the client could defend internally and externally — with the commercial team, with the CFO, with the board. The analytical asymmetry that had been tilted toward the licensor at the start of the engagement was no longer the defining feature of the negotiation.
CASE · Go To Market Model Development
A Covid-19 commercial organisation, stood up across 20+ markets in six months.
A global vaccine developer · commercial go-to-market architecture · Europe and APAC
01 · THE QUESTION
A vaccine developer had a Covid-19 asset moving through regulatory approval on an unprecedented timeline. The science was moving faster than the commercial organisation was built to absorb. They had six months to stand up functioning commercial operations across Europe and APAC on a compressed window that most specialty launches would have treated as reckless. The question wasn't whether to launch in each market. It was what operating model to build — how many people, in what structure, deployed how, with what governance — and the question could only be answered once the commercial opportunity itself had been properly sized. The temptation in a launch that compressed is to skip the analytical work and start hiring. That's how launches end up over-built against the wrong forecast or under-built against the right one.
02 · WHAT WE FOUND
The analytical sequence matters as much as any single finding inside it. We built the recommendation on six stages, each feeding the next. The market and competitive landscape came first — every asset in development, every sponsor, every likely entry date, segmented by region. We layered on the regulatory, recommendation, and funding environment next: which regulators were running which pathways, which national advisory bodies would move first, how each government was structuring advance purchase agreements. Third came the access and tender environment — not an abstract access view, but a country-by-country read of how each market was going to buy, at what price point, through which procurement mechanism. With those three evidence layers in place, we built a commercial forecast country by country, anchored in the real landscape rather than a top-down assumption. That forecast was the input to the organisational work, not the output of it. Only once we knew the demand signal by country could we credibly design alternative organisational models — different headcount structures, different regional aggregations, different governance footprints — and compare them.
03 · WHAT WE DID
We modelled three organisational structures against the forecast, each with its own resourcing curve, investment profile, and governance overhead. A thin central-and-country model, low overhead but limited orchestration capacity. A heavier three-layer model with regional aggregation, higher fixed cost but sharper decision-making under pressure. A hub-and-spoke variant that tried to split the difference. Each was built into a full P&L — revenue from the forecast, commercial spend from the resourcing design, infrastructure cost from the structure — and each P&L converted to a risk-adjusted NPV against the same assumptions.
The NPV comparison was the decisive output. The three-layer regional model carried more fixed cost but captured substantially more of the upside in the high-tender markets, because decisions happened fast enough to hit the procurement windows. The thin model missed the upside. The hub-and-spoke model read well on paper but created governance ambiguity under pressure. The recommendation fell out of the sequence rather than being pulled from a template.
04 · WHAT CHANGED
The client stood up a commercial organisation that was right-sized to demand — not over-built against an ambitious forecast, not under-built against a conservative one, but scaled against a structure where every headcount decision traced back to a specific commercial input. The team architecture held through the first wave of launches and adapted through the second, when variants emerged and access dynamics shifted. The recommendation had been built on evidence layers that could be re-run when the world moved, which meant the organisation could adapt without starting from scratch each time. That's the real output of an analytical sequence done properly: not just a recommendation, but a framework the client can keep using after the engagement ends.
CASE · COMMERCIAL STRATEGY & LAUNCH READINESS
An EU6 affiliate portfolio, harmonised and right-sized to six different markets.
A specialty pharma running six European affiliates · portfolio profitability review · EU6
01 · THE QUESTION
A specialty pharma was running six European affiliates — Germany, France, UK, Italy, Spain, Netherlands — and the group's aggregate profitability looked reasonable on paper. Underneath that number, performance was wildly uneven. Some affiliates were carrying the margin line; others were dragging it. The executive team knew the portfolio wasn't running at its full potential, but the conversation had stalled at the level of "some markets are better than others" without resolving into a decision. The question they brought to us wasn't which affiliates were underperforming — they already had a view on that. It was what to do about it. Which products should be in which markets? Where should investment go? Where was the growth they weren't capturing, and what was blocking it?
02 · WHAT WE FOUND
The aggregate view was hiding more than it revealed. When we cut the P&L by country and by product line, we found that the same SKU — priced at similar levels across the EU6 on paper — was generating very different economics country by country. In some markets it was a margin leader. In others it was marginal. In one case it was actively loss-making once the full cost of promoting it was counted. The variance wasn't random. It mapped to specific features of each market's access pathway, competitive position, and HCP prescribing dynamic — features the commercial teams in each country understood implicitly but that had never been surfaced in a comparable form at the group level. We also found that the portfolio wasn't actually harmonised. Despite being nominally a single European portfolio, each affiliate had accumulated its own SKU mix, its own promotional emphasis, its own pricing nuances, and its own account-level arrangements. Some of that local adaptation was serving the business; some of it was legacy inertia. Separating one from the other was the analytical task.
03 · WHAT WE DID
We built a country-level view of every product's economics against the specific access and competitive context it faced in that market. Then we re-evaluated the full portfolio country by country against three questions: does this product make sense to keep promoting in this market at the current investment level, does it make sense at a different level, or does it make sense to de-prioritise? The framework forced each product-country combination to earn its place against its own economics rather than being carried by the portfolio aggregate. On the back of that, we rebuilt the recommended portfolio mix affiliate by affiliate. Some SKUs that had been heavily promoted in one market got pulled back; others that had been under-invested were scaled up. Promotional resource shifted to follow the margin signal rather than historical patterns. Where an affiliate had been carrying loss-making products out of legacy commitment, we mapped a clean exit path that preserved customer relationships without continuing the investment. Where an affiliate was under-investing in a product that was margin-accretive, we built the business case for scaling up.
04 · WHAT CHANGED
The client harmonised the portfolio across the six markets while sharpening its local fit — those sound contradictory but the point is that harmonisation means running the same analytical discipline everywhere, not running the same portfolio everywhere. Each affiliate came out of the work with a clearer view of where it was making money, where it wasn't, and where to invest next. Loss-making SKUs were exited or restructured. Margin-accretive products got the resource they'd been starved of. Investment priorities stopped being a negotiation between country GMs and the group CFO and became a conversation about a shared framework. The portfolio was right-sized to each market's actual economics rather than inherited from what had been built five or ten years earlier.
CASE · OPPORTUNITY ASSESSMENT & BUSINESS DEVELOPMENT
A hepatitis E opportunity, sized for what it actually is — not what conventional market sizing would suggest.
A vaccine developer · HEV regional expansion assessment · commercial go/no-go
01 · THE QUESTION
A vaccine developer had a hepatitis E asset launched in one region and was considering whether to expand into another. The commercial case for the home region had been built years earlier and had held up well; the question was whether the same logic transferred. The executive team brought us in for a structured opportunity assessment — not a market sizing exercise dressed up as strategy, but a clear-eyed look at four things: how big the opportunity is in the new region, what the landscape looks like, what the execution challenges would be, and what market-shaping work would need to happen before the commercial case stood up. They wanted a go/no-go framing they could take to the board with the reasoning explicit and defensible.
02 · WHAT WE FOUND
The opportunity in the new region was real, but it wasn't the same opportunity. On opportunity size, the eligible population was meaningful — similar in absolute terms to the home region — but the pricing headroom was different, the diagnostic base was thinner, and the realistic penetration curve was slower. On the competitive and access landscape, the dynamics were materially different from the home market. Different payer archetypes, different regulatory pathway, a different set of adjacent products and competitors positioning against the same unmet need. The assumptions that had worked in the home region needed to be rebuilt, not copy-pasted. On execution challenges, three things stood out. The regulatory pathway in the new region was longer and less predictable. Clinical evidence requirements were different enough that some additional work would likely be asked for. Commercial infrastructure that existed in the home region — field force coverage, medical affairs relationships, payer access points — would have to be built or partnered for, and that wasn't trivial. On market-shaping requirements, disease awareness among non-specialist physicians was low, the diagnostic pathway wasn't standardised, and the funding and reimbursement environment hadn't yet accommodated products in this category. The commercial case depended on those pieces moving.
03 · WHAT WE DID
We built the assessment as four independent evidence streams that converged on one decision. Opportunity size was built as a patient-based forecast, anchored in regional epidemiology rather than scaled down from the home region. The competitive and access landscape was mapped through primary research with regional payers, regulators, and specialist physicians, plus a structured competitive intelligence read. Execution challenges were framed in terms of the specific capability gaps the developer would face versus what they already had in place. Market-shaping requirements were costed explicitly — not as a caveat, but as a line item in the business case. Each stream produced a substantive finding on its own, and the four findings together resolved into the go/no-go framing. We ran the commercial case under three scenarios — an aggressive trajectory that assumed the developer would invest in market shaping directly, a moderate trajectory that assumed partnerships with regional public-health actors, and a slow trajectory that assumed the developer rode the market rather than leading it. Each trajectory produced its own NPV, each with the risks and assumptions surfaced.
04 · WHAT CHANGED
The team came out of the work with a clear-eyed view of the decision. The opportunity is real, but it isn't a slam dunk. Expanding to the new region is a credible commercial move, but it's a different kind of move than the original launch was — one that requires more market-shaping work upfront, more partnership-building with regional stakeholders, and a longer payback than the home region took. The executive team had the reasoning on the table in a form they could take to the board and a framework they could revisit as the regional environment evolved. The decision they made was theirs, not ours; what we gave them was the analytical basis to make it without guessing.