Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More: Has the Long Tail Phenomenon Caught Up with Big Pharma?

Chris Anderson, Editor-in-Chief, Wired Magazine and Bestselling Author, The Long Tail: The Future of Business is Selling Less of More and Free: The Future of a Radical Price

Chris Anderson discusses technology and the transformation of clinical research in terms of the explosion of and access to relevant data. He calls this the ‘golden age of data acquisition’. He compares our industry in some respects to the music industry. Music appreciation is at an all time high. Ipods, etc rule the day. Accessing music online is the major source. The only area of the music industry in decline these days is the music label’s sale of hit albums or “blockbusters”. Sound familiar? His point is that this is not a crisis in music appreciation but a fragmentation of market share. He quips, “We are not a mass market, we are mass niches”. And technology has created both a near-zero cost to distribution and an explosion of content available. While everyone is enjoying ‘music’ there are hundreds of niches so as the number of products increase it creates a ‘long tail’ where popularity of a specific product declines in favor of personal selection amongst more and more products. And today there is ‘unlimited shelf space’ for products. This makes identifying peoples unique needs critical.

Does the same apply to the drug industry? Seventy five percent of the audience thinks so. So does Mr Anderson. What are the drivers? No mystery. These are things we have been talking about for some time.

Moving from Blockbusters to Nichebusters

Diagnostics boom leading individualized patients

Electronic medical records allow better targeting

Informed and empowered patients demanding more specialized care

In essence - One size fits all to personalized medicine

In effect personalized medicine is the long tail. Difficulty of execution in the construct of the industry? Extreme

When will it arrive? Most of the audience is thinking at least 5 to 10 years although a few percent say ‘never’. Mr Anderson thinks that maybe we just don’t understand what personalized medicine will look like. We tend to think of it in terms of institutions. Mr Anderson sees it in terms of personal best interests and technology, in this example ‘sensors’, mitigating for our creating personal positive feedback loops. In fact, aiding negative behavior modification. Personal sleep monitors are pocket sized and can record more data than a sleep lab, over a much longer period of time and at a much lower cost. One can use the data personally correlating it with weight, consumption, etc to create a personal set of observations in daily living. We don’t think of this as a clinical trial but Mr Anderson claims the impact is similar. He is right that we are all constantly gathering data and making decisions.

But will we be willing to share this data? It’s fine for data, especially personal physical or medical data to be captive within for personal health or lifestyle decisions. And we can already see some of this happening. Personal blood sugar monitors are an easy example. But are thousands of people willing to put that data online? And are they willing to share along with that their lifestyle, consumption and medication history. Can these data be captured for more public or industry use? I don’t know. Maybe?? Clearly though the current drug development and regulatory structure would need to be transformed dramatically. Is the new healthcare legislation a driver in favor of that?

And -Who are the victors? Mr Anderson thinks that the winner, like in the music industry transformation, will be the consumer.