Phil Thomas

March has been a successful month for all the team, starting with a great piece of positive news...

Nomination for Global Startup of the Year, Wales

We were pleased to announce that PharmaFootpath has been shortlisted for the Global Startup of the Year awards for Wales. We'll find out if we are the regional winner in June, which would potentially lead to the National Awards in September. Fingers crossed!!

Product development Updates

A great deal of our work in March has been working on things that aren't so visible, but are important to the future of the product being accurate, stable, and secure. It has meant that we've not been able to work on as many user requested features, but we hope to return to those very soon. But some of the more visible updates you will have seen recently include:

Shortage collection infrastructure

We've built the architecture to collect and update daily shortage announcements, and started to track our first markets (Germany + EU centralised). Now that we've added the first markets, we should be able to add others easier. We will be expanding this to include a few more markets this week, and then monitoring how this performs. Further expansion will come as we understand how data is published in different markets - but if there's specific markets you're interested in, please let me know.

Security improvements, including adding in multi-factor authentication (which you'll need to do)

Updating our login process resulted in a few people having a bit of a bumpy experience, in part because of unexpected issues with other systems (looking at you Microsoft, adding spaces to people copying passwords!!). But I beleive that all users are now back to accessing the data as expected. Please let me know if you are having any other issues! We will be asking people to add 2-factor authentication as a requirement in the near future. If you are happy to, please do this by going to your profile page and selecting add multi-factor authentication (see above)

Change of admin page

In the first version of PharmaFootpath, we had a seperate email address that we provided companies to login to an admin account. We've changed this to a single user being nominated as admin per company, and they can control this from an option in their settings menu. This is much simpler for teams, and reduces our need to maintain more pages.

Acceptance into Business Wales Accelerated Growth Programme

This scheme provides bespoke support to high growth companies with a base in Wales. The support will allow us to accelerate our plans to develop the features in the product, and grow the business to new markets. Our vision remains that the data is the start of a bigger plan to connect our customers into a trading network, where we identify more opportunites to grow our clients businesses. You should see the benefits from PharmaFootpath being accepted on to this scheme through the ongoing improvements in our data, products, and scale over the year ahead!

Other small fixes including:

• Removal of the ATC code explorer
• Redesigned sign in page to look like the rest of the site
• Landing page update to include our inclusion on the NVIDIA Inception programme, and some minor site improvements
• Parallel import lines more clearly identified on product pages
• Presentations drop down now alphabetically listed
• Various minor visual and technical tweaks.

Looking ahead to April

• Export to Excel is finally coming! It's been requested by a number of people, but we've had to ensure we had the security to build this first. With our work on this in the last few months, we're now able to provide this feature.
• Further improvements to data accuracy across various markets. The work we've done in March has created the foundation for consistent updating with less manual work (more robots, back from their nature walks - quicker, with far less risk of error)
• Hopefully, a few more features that users have requested, we've designed, and now just need to build. Before we then finally get to move on to our CRM, which I'm grateful for many people's input on so far.

As always, I'm keen to get feedback from all users, and you are welcome to book time with me to discuss improvements or features you'd like to see. You can book some time in my calendar here.

I'll also be back out travelling to new and existing customers gathering feedback in UK & Europe!

Phil

We've decided to move this post to Mondays instead of Fridays. But will continue to capture important changes.

The latest updates on EMA product registrations in the last week include

With the launch of Zefylti, there are now 8 different biosimilars for Neupogen in the markets, a competitive space!

Paxneury is an interesting new generic in the market, the only one for Intuniv in the EU. While there are a few generics in the US registered and found in PharmaFootpath, Paxneury is the first EU registered generic.

Uzpruvo is a Stelara biosimilar, and the majority of others also have a vial presentation for intravenous use. Stada has now expanded their approved presentations to include this also.

Quetiapine extended release is being reported as in shortage in a number of individual EU countries, and now the EMA has recognised this in their shortages tracking. The issue appears to be that the majority of these extended release products are from the same manufacturer, and production issues there are causing issues in multiple markets.

February may have been a shorter month, but we've managed to pack in some significant improvements!

Latest updates

New markets - USA and Switzerland

Two new important markets for PharmaFootpath! USA is obviously a global leader in pharmaceutical products, with the latest treatments being launched here. There's been some interesting challenges with adding this data, both with the way that we capture it, translate it to our standards, and then just the sheer volume of it! It's been great to have overcome these issues, and include this data.

With regards to pricing data, we're capture pricing around the prices paid by pharmacies and medicine organisations AFTER discounts have been applied, rather than list price. This real world data helps for companies looking to launch or supply products into the US, but can be radically different from the price companies looking to import US products from exporters.

New sign-in process

We've added Single Sign On to significantly improve the security posture of our applicaiton, following a review from a cybersecurity consultant. You will have received an invite to the new process if you're an active user, as old login credentials will no longer work. There's still some improvements to make on this, with an improvement to the appearance of the login screen as an example, so you may see some further small changes as we make some further final adjustments

Exact searching in active ingredients

We received user feedback that the advanced search was useful, but returning results for all products for an active ingredient, including those products where it was one of a combination was less than ideal. We've added an option to filter results to the exact match. This could be one active ingredient, or multiple like in the example below(e.g. show me the products where Levodopa and Cabridopa are the active ingredients AND there are no further active ingredients)

Newsletter

We've been posting Linkedin updates on the latest EMA changes to product registrations, but after some user feedback we've turned this into a newsletter also to make it easier to share. In addition, we've also started to add in information about changes to shortages at the EMA level, though these aren't very frequent.

If you'd like to see other information added in to this, please let me know and I'll see what we can include!

Minor improvements

• strengths alligned with active ingredients in products with multiple active ingredients
• UK(Northern Ireland) removed from EU filter (and USA, which accidentally snuck in there when we added this market somehow!)
• Security enhancements and controls
• Minor visual appearance improvements in tables
• Adding sorting by origin in the parallel trade table
• Other very small adjustments

March plans

Automation of more markets - This continues to be our main priority, and will likely be for the next 3 months.

Saying goodbye to the ATC code tree - Our observations are this isn't well used, and we'd prefer to trim out things unnecesary features to focus on the things that add most value

2 factor authentication - We'll be adding in mandatory 2fa for all users, which will provide significant security improvements

Looking ahead later to later this year, we'll be attending Expopharm in Düsseldorf, September 16-18th. This will be the first time that we'll have a stand at a conference, and I hope we can book in plenty of meetings with you in advance!

All the best,

Phil

The latest updates on EMA product registrations in the last week include:

There are now a significant number of Stelara biosimilars in the market, and competition is likely to be fierce throughout Europe as more tenders are released. It will be interesting to see how prices will stablise as this happenes, and how Stelara pricing will evolve in response.

Two new treatments related to Covid-19. One interesting point is this is the first authorised product for Arcturus Therapeautics. This company has an inhaled mRNA technology product for cystic fibrosis in development, that received orphan designation in February 2024.

There's a trend for launching more Pre-filled Pens, and Wezenla is the latest to add this presentation. Omvoh has added a patient orientated multidose, multistrength option to it's authorised presentations.

Shortages - No changes to the official EU shortages published in the last week.

A quieter week for product updates from the EMA, but still some interesting new announcements worth nothing

Two new products launched, one novel treatment, and a diagnostic. The final new product registration of note is the latest Stelara biosimilar to be launched, joining a number of others that have been registered in the last few months. This is bound to result in strong competition in the next 12 months, as more countries release tenders and Stelara loses market share.

Balversa was launched in August 2024 with 11 different variations available. There are 3 strengths were available, 3 mg, 4 mg, and 5 mg. At registration there were a number of different pack sizes available, now Janssen have reduced this down to 5 authorised presentations;

3 mg - packs size 56 and 84
4 mg - pack sizes 28 and 56
5 mg - pack size 28

There's unlikely to be any negative impacts for this to companies or patients working with this product.

Shortages - No new updates on centralised shortages in the last week. There are 13 ongoing EU level shortages in announcement, with Ixairo supposed to end immninently according to the last update, though this was a year ago. Such announcements are not always a reliable indicator however, with Fasturec expected to be resolved according to the MAH in June 2024, but remains an ongoing shortage.

PharmaFootpath news:

We're pleased to announce we now cover two further key markets, the USA and Switzerland! Please get in touch if you'd like to discuss these in more detail.