Confident TPP Decisions in 7 Weeks — Cutting the Legacy Timeline by 40%

The Challenge

For pharmaceutical brand teams navigating pre-Phase 3 decisions, TPP research is among the highest-stakes investments they make. The standard approach — a sequential 12 week process requiring purchase order generation, prolonged TPP finalization, multiple approval rounds, and extensive data preparation before any insight reaches the team — was failing to keep pace with the speed of clinical development and commercial planning.

Brand teams were being asked to make critical trial design, endpoint selection, and forecasting decisions with incomplete data, or worse, data that arrived too late to influence the decisions it was meant to inform.

CONTEXT

Phase 2 program approaching critical Phase 3 design decisions
Cross-functional alignment needed across clinical, commercial, and market access
Legacy TPP research timeline (10–12 weeks) incompatible with decision pace
Existing secondary and primary data available but not yet synthesized
Need for both statistical rigor and scenario-planning flexibility in the output

Our Approach

Shapiro+Raj designed an accelerated 7-week approach that fundamentally restructured the TPP research process — not by cutting rigor, but by parallelizing work streams and front-loading insight generation.

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

01
Determine the minimum clinically meaningful performance thresholds across key endpoints to guide Phase 3 trial design
02
Quantify the commercial value of specific clinical investments by modeling market share sensitivity across TPP scenarios
03
Map the adoption curve from launch through peak share to inform HCP targeting and launch sequencing strategy

The first differentiator was digital panel generation through Stella, our AI platform, which enabled rapid synthesis of existing secondary and primary data to develop informed TPP attribute ranges for the conjoint in week one — eliminating the prolonged internal debate that typically consumes weeks with legacy approaches.

Preliminary insights were delivered at week three, giving the brand team directional guidance on threshold performance and motivating attribute clusters before conjoint fieldwork was even complete. This allowed commercial and clinical teams to begin scenario planning in parallel.

The conjoint instrument was purpose-built as a multi-faceted tool: N=125 non-KOL HCPs for statistical rigor, a conjoint design with a simulator deliverable, “voice memo” style open-ended questions to capture qualitative nuance alongside quantitative data, and our proprietary PROsician™ model to account for diffusion of innovation dynamics ensuring the output wasn’t a static peak-share estimate, but a full adoption curve forecast.

Insights Delivered

KEY FINDINGS

Threshold analysis identified minimum performance floors across key endpoints, giving the clinical team clear, data-backed design guidance without over- or under-powering the study
Market share modeling across hundreds of TPP scenarios revealed which specific endpoint improvements carried the greatest commercial value, quantifying the return on targeted clinical investment
The PROsician™ adoption curve showed that launch velocity and early adopter profile were as strategically significant as peak share, with distinct barriers mapped for majority adoption
Preliminary directional findings at week three enabled parallel scenario planning across clinical, commercial, and market access before final fieldwork was complete

Strategic Impact

The simulator was delivered at week seven — five weeks ahead of when a traditional approach would have produced its final presentation. This gave the brand team’s clinical, commercial, and market access functions a shared, data-driven view of the opportunity before critical Phase 3 design decisions were locked.

The interactive Excel simulator became a living strategic tool: teams used it to run real-time “what-if” analyses as clinical data evolved, allowing for dynamic alignment across functions without requiring additional rounds of research. The client attributed meaningful cost savings and accelerated internal decision-making directly to the approach.

KEY DELIVERABLES

Interactive Excel simulator enabling real-time “what-if” scenario modeling across hundreds of TPP configurations
Preliminary directional insights report delivered at week three
PROsician™ adoption curve forecast mapping launch velocity, early adopter profile, and barriers to majority adoption
Threshold analysis report with clinical design guidance across key endpoints
Market share sensitivity analysis quantifying the commercial value of specific endpoint improvements

We had the simulator in hand before most agencies would have even finished fieldwork. That’s not just faster — it’s a fundamentally different way of working.

TPP research should inform your Phase 3 design — not lag behind it. Talk to us about our accelerated approach.