Building the Financial Case for a Phase 3 Drug Asset

The Challenge

The founding team had deep scientific expertise but no commercial infrastructure. They needed to validate their revenue assumptions with primary market research and translate that into a financial model that would hold up under investor scrutiny — without the budget for a full-time commercial team.

What I Did

• Conducted semi-structured interviews with physicians on standard of care, prescribing intent, and evidence requirements — directly informing timing and adoption assumptions in the model.
• Interviewed payers to understand utilization management practices and evidence thresholds, grounding reimbursement timing in real-world payer behavior rather than optimistic projections.
• Built a patient-based peak sales forecast with scenario analysis, modeled gross-to-net pricing across Medicare, Medicaid, Commercial, State Exchange, and direct-to-consumer channels.
• Used agentic AI tools to efficiently compile clinical guidelines, downstream cost data, and comparable drug pricing benchmarks — then verified every key assumption against primary sources and domain expertise.

Outcome

The company entered their Series A process with a financial model grounded in primary research — one their team could defend assumption-by-assumption. The provider interviews also surfaced insights that directly informed Phase 3 trial endpoint design, a deliverable that extended well beyond the financial model itself.