Overview
The accelerated change that took place during the COVID-19 pandemic and the convergence of breakthrough scientific innovation, digital advancements and new business models have reshaped the life sciences industry. These advancements offer promise for substantial improvement in patient care and have opened up new opportunities for players across the life sciences market landscape.
However, this evolving and increasingly competitive landscape has also raised several new challenges, including increased pricing pressure, uncertain market access dynamics, evolving consumer behavior and disruption from nontraditional healthcare players. These trends are forcing life sciences companies to think strategically about which aspects of their current business they want to invest in and which new avenues of growth they will need to explore.
At L.E.K., we help life sciences and pharmaceutical executives develop practical strategies and plans to improve healthcare for patients and win in a dynamic global healthcare market.
How we help
Small, midsize and large multinational life sciences companies routinely engage us to:
- Define and execute corporate strategy: We work closely with our clients to define and execute customized strategies to drive long-term, sustainable value. Whether it’s defining a new business model, driving growth beyond a first product, evaluating attractive adjacencies, determining how to scale the team or building franchise leadership, our team has a proven track record of helping our clients build winning strategies unique to their particular circumstances.
- Expand into new markets: We help our clients expand into new geographies and market segments. This includes mature and emerging markets; prescription and consumer markets; primary and specialty care markets; chronic, acute and orphan markets; research, diagnostic and therapeutic markets; and new, innovative markets. Our market access strategies for clients open the door for growth and long-term value creation.
- Execute value-creating deals: We support our clients at every stage of the deal lifecycle — from search and evaluation to execution and post-transaction integration. We have helped our life sciences clients execute more than $140 billion worth of transactions including in-licensing, out-licensing, strategic partnerships, M&A, joint ventures, divestitures and royalty monetization transactions.
- Launch innovative products and services: We team up with our clients to develop commercial launch strategies in mature and emerging markets. We have demonstrated success in supporting leading pharmaceutical, biotech and device brands across all key regions. Our commercial planning and launch expertise includes pharmaceutical and biopharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, life science tools, diagnostics, and life sciences enablers e.g., CROs/CDMOs.
- Optimize operations: We work closely with our clients to optimize operations, organizational structures, financials and processes across the life sciences value chain. Our work for clients has increased productivity and contributed to top- and bottom-line growth at the corporate, business unit and operational team levels in a number of life sciences sectors.
Success stories
We have helped companies across several life sciences sectors recalibrate their product strategy or business model to drive profitable growth and outsized returns.
- Transformative business development: A global pharmaceutical company was facing a revenue cliff as a result of the impending loss of exclusivity of a number of its key products. L.E.K. helped avert this crisis by developing a more aggressive strategy and designing an innovative business development process and organizational structure. This resulted in the company completing 12+ transactions in 18 months, increasing revenue by more than 20%, adding more than 30% to its market cap and transforming the company’s growth trajectory.
- Focusing on profitable growth: A midsize contract manufacturer was struggling to define a compelling value proposition and determine which parts of its business to invest in for the future. L.E.K. helped this client develop a more focused strategy that accelerated its growth trajectory and enhanced emphasis on profitable growth. This new strategy helped double client revenue and led to tens of millions of dollars in incremental cash flow. More important, it has increased company value more than three times.
- Brand revitalization: A product launched by a major biotech company was significantly underperforming, hurting brand image and potentially future franchise performance. Using a combination of advanced analytical techniques, L.E.K. helped the company identify the true drivers of underperformance and developed a strategy to revitalize product sales. By targeting these drivers, the company grew product sales by nearly 10 times over the next four years and successfully launched follow-on products and services that further elevated the franchise.
- Business model innovation: A leading molecular information platform was trying to understand how it could best leverage its core information and technology assets to drive shareholder value. Within the management team, there was significant uncertainty about which market opportunities were most attractive and what business model was best-suited to pursue them. L.E.K. helped segment potential customers and designed core use cases, uncovering a new revenue opportunity worth upward of $400 million. Our strategy also recommended several partnerships, which have led to further value accretion and market validation.
- Turnaround strategy: An oncology-focused biotech company was struggling to maximize the value of its marketed products while also realizing the potential of its promising pipeline. The client’s existing operating plan was projected to exhaust the company’s cash reserves inside of two years, and thus it needed an actionable strategy that could drive value quickly. L.E.K. helped this client identify some of the key drivers of its commercial success, divest some of its European operations, reallocate funding to the highest ROI pipeline opportunities and right-size operating costs. This resulted in a multipronged turnaround strategy, which ultimately culminated with a large transaction and an over five times increase in market cap in less than 12 months.
