Elevating Pharma Launch Insights through Primary & Secondary Analytics

Inside Gilead Sciences, colleagues often describe Varun Sharma as the strategist who can map a launch plan end to end, and the listener who never forgets the human story behind a data point. With 12+ years in biopharma—and multiple oncology and virology launches—Varun leads new product planning, forecasting, market research, and patient analytics for Gilead Sciences as the Director of Business Analytics team. His hallmark is pairing what people say in market research with what actually happens in the real world through secondary data analysis, so the patient voice shows up clearly in launch brand plans.

“My rule of thumb is listening closely to the story, then pressure-test it with data,” Varun says. “That’s how the patient’s needs don’t get lost between intention and action of treating HCPs.”

Putting Patients at the Center of Launch Planning

Varun and his team studied metastatic non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) by tracing the experience as patients live it. They kept the circle wide in market research—patients, caregivers, nurses, and oncologists to stay close to all the stakeholders that impact a patient’s journey from diagnosis to treatment and then disease progression. Primary research gave the texture that claims data can’t: the breath-holding before scan results, the silence after a hard phrase, the few points where a small nudge changes treatment decisions.

What they saw was consistent. At initiation, the patient and HCP frames usually line up and point toward positive outcomes through first line of treatment. After disease progression, many patients start trading for time, comfort, and quality of life, while the talk in clinic often keeps to protocol and treatment efficacy. Observing these emotional pivots with disease progression, keeping patients at the heart of the launch strategy became brand team’s North Star.

“If nothing shifts after disease progression, we end up talking past the patient,” Varun says. “The job is to meet the moment with messages, choices, and help that match the life patients are living.”

Integrating Primary Research with Secondary Data

Qualitative market research helped explain the reasons behind physician treatment choices while secondary claims data analysis further confirmed what those choices looked like in real life. Varun’s team tied together both the primary market research qualitative data with the secondary patient claims data. Using insights from primary interviews like HCP perceptions, habits, and comfort with emerging clinical data, Varun and his team built different HCP segments and then validated them through claims data. This pairing of primary with secondary data helped find the HCPs who are actual early adopters along with the factors that motivate early adoption, and what type of patient archetypes are first to benefit from these new therapies. This helped the brand leaders to design tactics for the levers that truly shift HCP prescribing behaviors.

“We didn’t treat patient claims data as an afterthought,” Varun explains. “We designed the qualitative market research to generate hypotheses—and the claims data to prove or disprove them.”

A Closer Look: Patient Journey through Primary & Secondary Research

Through the qualitative market research, Varun’s team figured out the inflection points in the patient journey like diagnosis disclosures, biomarker result discussions, switching treatment regimens after progression, and then mapped the emotional tone at every stage of patient journey. For the quantitative side, the team studied real-world patient journey through extensive secondary data analysis like time to therapy initiation, regimen sequencing, patient treatment persistency, and HCP referral networks. Varun’s team figured out multiple misalignments by overlaying the qualitative and quantitative patient journeys. For ex., physicians voiced willingness to adopt newer and efficacious targeted therapies in primary market research, but real-world claims data analysis showed inertia and defaulting to old prescribing behaviors for these physicians.

These findings by Varun’s team translated into actionable insights for the launch brand plans by the marketing team. Messaging for later-lines of treatment shifted to acknowledge patient’s quality-of-life priorities alongside efficacy of new treatments. And market development launch plans prioritized HCP segments where claims data showed early adoption of other new therapies for strong uptake post launch.

“Good launch plans don’t shout louder; they fit better,” Varun says. “When the plan fits the way decisions really happen, adoption follows without forcing it.”

Why It Matters

By fusing primary HCP research with secondary patient claims analytics; Varun helped Gilead ground its NSCLC launch planning in reality: what patients feel and ask for, what clinicians believe and actually do, and where systems either enable or block the next best step. The result is a more confident, patient-forward strategy that gives brand leaders a tighter feedback loop—one where early claims data readouts quickly confirm whether the right needs are being met and which levers to adjust for successful product uptake post launch.

It’s a model Varun now applies broadly across Gilead’s pipeline: start with the human story, challenge it with data, and then build brand tactics that respect both. That balance—empathetic listening plus empirical verification—is the through-line of his work and the reason the patient voice carries further in every Gilead launch plan.

“Patients are telling us what they need—sometimes in words, often in patterns,” Varun adds. “Our job is to hear both and act accordingly.”

Published on: Monday, August 18, 2025, 04:16 PM IST