Phil Thomas

As we head into June, we're pleased to have brought on more clients from a growing number of countries. I've talked about our goal of developing a network of clients built on top of our data, and we're very close to a significant first step in our tech to allow this. Exciting times!

Looking back over what was achieved in April, there were some significant steps in our data processing for more markets, as well as redesigning how we structure and display parallel trade data. It was great to release features that we'd been asked about for some time, such as export to excel. Now, we turn back again to more data processing and quality systems of the data through the months ahead.

Launches in April

Export to Excel - now live! It's been a regularly requested feature, and I'm pleased we're finally live with this. So far I've not had feedback of any difficulties around this. If you do have feedback, please share!!

New tabs design - now live! This makes navigating pages much easier. As I've discussed with users, I've heard no significant problems in moving to this navigation. Again, let me know if you have any concerns, but otherwise I think this has been a good user experience improvement.

Updated licenses numbers in the Parallel Trade Explorer - We took feedback that it would be more useful to have registration numners displayed in the Parallel Trade Explorer rather than the license registration number, and everyone I checked with agreed. This has now been updated as shown above. You can search by registration number also, if you prefer.

Displaying PI license count - We've a significant change in how we collect and structure data around parallel trade licenses in the background. Now, in the Product Explorer where we have identified parallel import lines for that product, we're making it visibly clear. For example above, we've identified 10 German PI licenses of Abraxane. There's still some work to do on this, so some countries are still being processed, and national parallel trade licenses have further challenges. But this will make it much clearer where licenses are obtained against which lines (with further details on these on one of the product page tabs). The Parallel Trade Explorer will not be removed, this is just working to make the Product Explorer clearer.

Smaller Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue where if an active ingredient had only one salt available, you couldn't deselect that salt
• For administrators, moved the button to edit company profile to the drop down menu for consistency
• Fixed not being able to type the country in the country filter for price plot graphs
• Fixed an issue with incorrect German ex-factory price in some instances
• Fixed an issue with Finland data having duplicates to old test data, which contained some inaccuracies (my old nemesis Excel is partially to blame for this one!)
• Fixed an issue with latest Latvian prices not syncing as expected.

I feel we've had quite a few bugs reported to us this month, and as far as I know we've resolved them all. I'm extremely grateful to everyone who has taken the time to contact me about bugs. As I've said to everyone, we're still early stage, we've alot more improvements to make, but we'll make it far quicker if you keep on helping us by sharing any frustrtations you come across!

Upcoming

Ireland data - I'd hoped it would be in May, but we didn't quite finish the checks in time. It's very, very likely going to be the first week of June.

Big data updates for more countries - We have been rolling out our machine learning system over new markets, which leads to more regular product updates, better accuracy, and other cool things in the bachground. Next up are Sweden and Denmark, before moving on to hopefully a couple more in June. We're still on course for full coverage by September (but there's always the risk of a country changing its data structures and delaying this).

Company profiles - If you haven't had your administrator update and edit your company profile on the WDA licenses section, please ask them to do so. We're working on an update that will make this very important in the near future. I'll be setting up calls to discuss this in more detail over the next two months.

Final note

I'll soon be opening up the calendar for Expopharm, so I hope to meet with as many of you attending as possible! We'll have a stand, and even some tables and chairs, so if you can spare the time to sit with me and talk, I'd love to catch up again face to face! Looking forward to seeing you there!

Phil

As always, there's a lot going on! We've made great improvements to data, added new features, increased the numbers of markets we track on daily shortages, and we've added more clients from more countries. Welcome to the newest partners!

For everyone I've spoken with, you'll know that the goal is to create a connceted network of customers built on our data. with more representatives in more countries, it's getting easier for me to provide better introductions between more companies in more countries, and understand how we can better deliver features in PharmaFootpath to grow your businesses, and servc patients better. We're now experimenting with some new features I think will really enhance that deliver this, and look forward to sharing these once we get initial designs created!

Product improvements

Austrian Data Added - The latest market to be included! Some markets have some unique challenges in preparing the data, and the more challenging ones in the EU we've left until later. But we're pleased to have cracked Austria, and included this now.

Italian Data - we've significantly improved the quantity and quality of our data for Italy. I've spoken with a number of clients who've talked about Italy being a market that has been challenging to get reliable data from, but we've been able to make significant improvements following our new scripts for this market. We're still waiting for WDA licenses to be published for Italy, but the product registration has been significantly improved. Final improvements continue to be made, but we've overcome the key problems that have limited this until now.

Netherlands Data - Netherlands is one of the few countries that doesn't provide data on which packs are in the market, only that the product is authorised. What that means is though we can see a product like Abstral 600 microgram from Gruenenthal BV is registered, we can't see if there's a pack size 1, 4, 20, 100 etc in the market. This breaks our way of displaying data compared to all other countries. We've tried to find a solution, but so far have not been able to. We've made the decision to import this data with a unique appearance:
- pack size will say "N/A"
- price will be displated "per unit"

What this means is that you can compare the price to other countries by thinking "there's a pack size 30 for this in other markets, I can multiply this price by 30 and see if that's competitive". This isn't ideal, but it's an improvement on not having the data!

Export to Excel (live in the next 24 hours!)

We're pleased to have export to Excel as an option added to our product explorer. For this we will allow people to export everything in the list they've applied filters to, and we'll have a balance of rows available to download each month as part of our controls. I've put 2000 rows as our initial balance that we think is reasonable for exporting each month, but this may need to be adjusted. If you do find that this isn't sufficient, please speak with me!

Active Ingredient grouping - The addition of advanced searching previously was a good improvement, but we hit an issue with not being able to select all the base API and it's corresponding salts. This has now been resolved, and you can choose all, or remove specific salts within the drop down menu

Bug fixes:

• Our 'Injectables' group filter in presentations was not always visible, this has been fixed to make it easier for group selecting
• Corrected reference from Nvidia to NVIDIA after re-checking the brand guidelines!!
• Graph overflowing bug , which occured when prices for future dates are provided by some countries, is resolved
• Removed some duplicate Australian data
• Resolved bug that stopped some users changing currency
• Various other small bugs

The plan for May...

Irish data - This should be added this month. We have a final piece of work connecting some datasets and we'll have this published. This is the last major EU market that we have to add, and we'll then pause adding new markets to focus on other product improvements. (We'll come back to other markets if there's specific demand or need, but want to make what we have as robust as possible first)

New page layout - There will be a new layout of the product pages, moving it to a tabs layount rather than a series of rows to work through. This will make it simpler to review and look through various data without having to scroll through the page. A screenshot of this is below:

CRM - Our goal is to have a first version working for testing in May. This is a significant launch for us, and I think provides something really unique in pharma trading. I'm really excited to get people on to this!

Ongoing data improvements - We know some data still isn't perfect. Sometimes this is a mix of missing information in raw data, or its that we've miscalculated in one of the may different databases we extract. Each time we receive a report, we try to both fix it and write checks to ensure we don't repeat it. If you do come across something, please do tell us so we can investigate. There is now a lot of data, so we may not always know about different pieces in different markets!

ExpoPharm 2025 - If you'd like to meet me and the team in Dusseldorf in September, please let me know! We're booking our flights, and getting ready to showcase what we've built at our first trade show!

As always, if you'd like to discuss this or any other points, please feel free to send me a message, give me a call, or book something in my calendar here

Thanks for all your support!

Phil

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