Top Pharma Trends of 2024

Consumers are often more comfortable paying inconsistent rates when a good or service is one-off – like surgery – and less comfortable paying inconsistent rates when a good is undifferentiated – like prescription drugs, where a price increase doesn't necessarily suggest better product quality.

In spite of this, prescription drugs can have wildly different prices even among stores that are only miles apart. By searching for a specific drug, GoodRx shows users a map of nearby pharmacies with overlaid drug prices.

One of the strongest drivers of growth for GoodRx is doctor recommendations. In fact, GoodRx says that around 1/3 of U.S. doctors provide information about the company to their patients. With access to lower prices, patients can more often afford the medication and are more likely to stick to the treatment course. This means superior results, leading to happier patients and better business for doctors.

Today, more than 10 million Americans use GoodRx every month to lower their healthcare costs.

Bluechew - a chewable tablet for erectile dysfunction - is different from competitor products marketed by Hims and Roman in one big way: The official site only processes ~¼ of the orders; the rest are processed on a series of affiliate sites that are all tied back to a single move the brand made that seems to have defined the company's high growth trajectory: posting their site on CrakRevenue.com, a marketplace for affiliate programs

Lookalikes of the official site (bluechew.com) can be found at bluechews.com, chew.blue (25M visits in March 2020), and more. The affiliate sites' footers all include links back to CrakRevenue, where the approach has been so successful that CrakRevenue did a case study on BlueChew in which they called it their most profitable program over the past 5 years. In fact, they listed the payout per sale at $50.

Because CrakRevenue has every incentive to help their affiliates perform, the company posts guidelines and provides prebuilt marketing funnel templates. One of the biggest guideline sets is around the framing of the product. For years, Cialis and Viagra were clearly labeled as drugs to solve issues had by "older men". CrakRevenue argues that this caps the market and holds it back from ever becoming a trend among younger men.

BlueChew claims the chewable factor -decreases the time it takes for the drug to start working. And though the difference in speed between chewable forms of the drug and capsule forms is debated in papers, the company has brought this feature to the front and center of its marketing.

Searches for Adderall have a unique seasonality in Google Trends whose pattern mimics that of education software and reflects one driver of changes in Adderall demand: school exams. Demand for Adderall and similar drugs has been rising for decades, with much of the rise coming from higher rates of diagnosis. In the last two decades, the number of children with ADHD diagnoses doubled.

Done ADHD ties in to both higher demand and higher awareness by giving people a way to get an ADHD diagnosis online, and then get a prescription.

The model of using a test to sell a product extends well beyond ADHD medication: it’s used in everything from online hearing tests and sleep studies to online internet speed tests and GPU stress tests for selling computer components.

More broadly, the entire approach to getting medical treatment is inverting. The pre-Internet approach was that a person went to a doctor, who would recommend a specialist, who would write a prescription. Today, it's easier to do research independently, online, especially on problems where the symptoms are self-reported. So an increasingly common cycle is to go online, find a specialist and get a prescription. It’s “restaurant-menu medicine”, where consumers choose exactly what they know they want. Instead of being the main player in the treatment process, doctors are relegated to being gatekeepers who double-check a self-diagnosis and provide a prescription.

Today, Craigslist is still cited by many universities as the best place to recruit participants for clinal trials.

It’s all part of the great lengths pharma companies go to in order to get their new drugs approved. The total bill for developing a new drug averages around $2.6 billion and part of this is clinical trials. Beyond their direct cost, there’s a huge time cost too. Most clinical trials get dragged out which can cost pharma companies even more in lost revenue.

Even still, clinical trials are very inefficient: 70% of clinical trial participants live more than 2 hours from trial sites.

As telemedicine startups push medicine and testing kits into consumers' homes for treatment, pharma companies are increasingly doing the same for drug research.

By helping to coordinate decentralized trials, Medable is able to reduce clinical trial times by 50%, equating to enormous savings.

Some companies find strategic ways to bypass regulations altogether: Plenity is one of the fastest-growing weight loss aids and even though it looks like a pill, the company behind it was able to get it classified as a medical device rather than a drug.

The FDA approval process for medical devices allows approval in cases where a device shows equivalent functionality to an existing treatment, which is a much cheaper and faster approach than the oftentimes billion-dollar investment of a full clinical trial.