Pangaea Helps Tackle Big Changes, Advances in Canadian Pharmaceuticals

AS EXCITING NEW HEALTHCARE AND PHARMACEUTICAL ADVANCES GRIP THE WORLD,

The Pangaea Group, an Oakville, Ontario-based consulting company brings their insight, network and expertise to healthcare, pharmaceutical and biotech businesses and their partners to solve unique business challenges. The Pangaea team provides clients support from insight to execution across the spectrum of corporate, business and trade strategy.

“We have been fortunate to build relationships with many of the brand pharmaceutical and biotech organizations in Canada,” says Sylvie Pilon, the firm’s Director. Pangaea’s clients are mostly based in Canada, but the firm also works with offshore companies, often headquartered in the United States and Europe, that wish to establish pharmaceutical operations in Canada.

“From a corporate strategy perspective, we spend a great deal of time assisting our clients to identify and establish the needed infrastructure in Canada from planning through to first sale and subsequent stages of growth. For international and Canadian organizations that wish to commercialize in Canada, we also help them with business strategy by conducting market assessments, assisting in lifecycle planning, and facilitating strategic brand planning exercises to enable decision making,” explains Pilon.

Pangaea’s focus with respect to business strategy is on the pharmaceutical and/or biologic products that its clients’ brand teams are commercializing. It assesses the viability of those products in the Canadian market, and then enables cross-functional teams to assemble strategies and tactics to help get medications to patients.

Pangaea’s work with clients regarding trade strategy centers around specialty and rare disease products getting through the supply chain from the manufacturer to their customers, whether it be through retail pharmacy, hospital or specialty distribution channels. It involves establishing trade relationships with the client’s direct customers, which are usually Canadian wholesale and specialty distributors or selfdistributing pharmacy retailers.

“The benefit we provide for our clients is assistance in understanding the changes that are occurring across the health care system and the implications for their business and patients,”

Those changes include major regulatory reform around pricing, safety and controls. The pharmaceutical and biotech industries have also produced and brought to market vastly new and/or advanced medical products compared to what was previously available, says Pilon. For example, “we’ve seen a very strong pipeline of research in the oncology space that span numerous indications across multiple types of potential cancer treatments. We’ve already seen new products in hepatitis and many other disease states that have created encouraging new options for patients in the last number of years. That’s driven a new dialogue in terms of being able to deploy therapies that ten years ago we didn’t know were possible,” says Pilon. Those changes have resulted in a vastly different marketplace for pharmaceutical and bio-tech companies and their stakeholders, which Pangaea helps them navigate, she notes.

Economic conditions have, however, resulted in a degree of compression and added complexity within the healthcare industry, forcing organizations to operate in a more integrated manner cross-functionally and within tighter boundaries than they did in the past. They need to do this in order to remain agile with respect to managing both risk and opportunity as they navigate market access, educate the marketplace, and optimize a commercial supply chain, while also ensuring compliance fundamentals are maintained in coordination with regulatory authorities, explains Pilon.

“The benefit we provide for our clients is assistance in understanding the changes that are occurring across the health care system and the implications for their business and patients,” he adds.

“We continue to be a strong supporter of making sure there is a successful, efficient entry of new products into Canada, and we’re driven by a vision for an increasingly strong healthcare system that improves the well-being and health of Canadians,” says Pilon.