29 September 2022

7 Years ago: from hotel lobbies to the boardroom

7 years ago, Preeti Patel and her team of 2 were working from hotel lobbies with the ambition to drastically transform how biopharmaceutical companies successfully navigate getting an asset from development to market by accessing the best insights.

GPI faced many challenges in the past 7 years and it seemed that the odds were stacked high given that around 90% of start-ups fail and 70% fail within the first 2 – 5 years. Besides the fact we were a British start-up company amidst a global pandemic and Brexit, female founders according to statistics only received <1% of VC funding each year.

It’s been an astonishing journey, and with each step towards the right direction. This specific milestone represents a significant shift from the company’s initial start-up stage to a full-scale, established business. This achievement represents the culmination of hard work and dedication on the part of our entire company.

The innovator behind the algorithm

Preeti Patel was mindful of the growing concern around medicine price and access, witnessing first-hand how drugmakers were facing delayed negotiations and limited price and access reductions which were subsequently ending in failed drug launches. Drug pricing and market access (P&MA) news were becoming hugely topical and was hitting global headlines almost daily.

It was evident there was a need by pharma and biotech companies for more reliable and on-demand pricing intelligence.

Frequent P&MA challenges tackled by companies include:

Basing pricing decisions on guesswork or limited, snapshot research.

The need for more robust insights of competing assets.

Reactive instead of proactive to events affecting their asset.

Unaware of the importance of making the right decisions early in the drug development lifecycle.

With this goal in mind, Preeti saw a clear gap in the market, and she and her small GPI team of 2 set out to develop a sophisticated platform that would later-on revolutionise the pricing and market access (P&MA) industry.

GPI

In 2016, GPI opened its first office in Euston House which comprised of 4 desks and 7 employees. With the support and trust of our investors, GPI pulse™ was born, formally known as ‘POD’ in its early stages of development. GPI pulse™ a dynamic data analytics platform produces global, value, price, and market access insights. After the successful and official hard launch of GPI pulse™ in 2017, the platform as well as the greater organisation went on to win multiple awards every year validating the quality and merit of its datal

Incremental steps that led to exponential growth

The world shut down in 2020 and GPI found itself in the unprecedented situation of trying to scale-up during the COVID pandemic. Most drug pipelines were halted to focus on finding treatments for COVID. GPI rapidly switched operations to fully remote and started adapting to the new reality.

COVID vaccines were developed and by the end of 2021 the economy could begin to recover. GPI stabilized and managed to raise another round of investment and continued their growth journey with a new plan to reach the top!

We formed new strategic partnerships, upgraded GPI pulse™ capabilities to the new 2.0, built-up 100,000 brands on our platform at this point, secured multiple multi-year accounts and grew our company to 50 employees located in London, Cambridge, and Mumbai. Our data and consulting services were positioned amongst the ‘best’ P&MA companies in the world. The future was promising.

From Start-up to Scale-up, the present day – 2022

The industry:

The landscape of drug research and development has shifted significantly in the post-COVID world. Companies are now under greater pressure to make decisions faster than ever before. This means that in order to stay competitive, progressive companies are looking towards on-demand data technology within pricing and market access as a critical tool to shape strategies.

Product development:

This is the reason why GPI have spent more than four years researching and developing, our award-winning methodology for early stages of drug development. We can now predict value-based prices across key markets within a 10% range in oncology and immunology therapy areas – which is just incredible for any P&MA strategy. We look forward to the official launch of the GPI platform in November this year.

Our business:

GPI continues to grow with an impressive workforce of 72 employees to date and with several new roles in the pipeline to help facilitate this positive growth. GPI established itself in its new headquarters in London, Mayfair with offices also in Mumbai. GPI pulse™ 2.0 now has over 162,149 brands spanning across 95+ countries and 15 therapy areas. GPI’s dedicated product and development teams continues to focus on the innovative advancements of the platform.

The Future of GPI

With more personalised and targeted therapies entering the market, we see a growing demand for more granular and integrated data, and advanced technology such as artificial intelligence (AI) to derive deeper insights for more robust decisions. That is why GPI plans to further develop and scale it’s horizon agile methodology in this direction.

We are proud of our accomplishments and vision which is to disrupt the way in which medicines are brought to market, creating sustainable access for all. The life-science industry is experiencing huge transformation, and our goal is to play a pivotal part in that transformation, supporting the industry in driving change.

We would like to thank all our stakeholders and passionate employees in making this milestone possible. We would also like to thank our partners and clients who have been with us on this exciting journey!

Here are some interesting facts about GPI in reflection of the past 7 years.

Here are 7 fun facts about GPI