Pillar 5 of 6 · Commercial
Is it worth it if it works?
The commercial case behind the clinical one — market, price, standard of care and patent runway, each an explicit assumption you can move.
Is it worth it if it works?
What it answers
Is it worth it if it works?
A trial can be scientifically sound, operationally feasible, and still not worth running. This pillar builds the commercial case from the same public evidence as the clinical one, with every assumption named so your finance team can argue with it rather than around it.
How big is the market, really?
A revenue funnel anchored in the same epidemiology denominators as the cohort pillar, stepped down through explicit and over-ridable assumptions to a serviceable obtainable share.
What is the asset worth, risk-adjusted?
Peak revenue, a directional probability of success and an exclusivity horizon composed into base, optimistic and pessimistic expected net present value — with a sensitivity that shows which input is actually moving the answer.
What can you charge, and for how long?
A defensible price range anchored on cost-effectiveness thresholds and reconciled against observed international net prices, and the loss-of-exclusivity year that bounds the whole revenue curve.
Inside the pillar
5 analyses, each one named and cited
These are the analyses that actually run — not a category list. Each states what it computes and what it needs, because an analysis that quietly degrades is worse than one that reports it could not run.
Market sizing (TAM / SAM / SOM)
Turns the epidemiology denominators used by the cohort pillar and a cross-market per-defined-daily-dose price gradient into a revenue funnel — total, serviceable available and serviceable obtainable market — plus a launch uptake trajectory. Every funnel step is an explicit assumption you can override.
Needs
An indication and a class or molecule. Assumptions that have no published citation behind them are flagged as uncited rather than presented as sourced — the distinction is visible on the tile.
Risk-adjusted valuation (eNPV)
Derives peak revenue from the market-sizing obtainable share, probability of success from the verdict pillar’s prior, and an exclusivity horizon from the patent analysis, then computes base, optimistic and pessimistic expected net present value with a one-parameter tornado sensitivity. The arithmetic is deterministic; no language model sets a number.
Needs
A market size and a directional probability of success. When either is missing the analysis reports no data rather than inventing a return — an eNPV with a fabricated input is worse than no eNPV.
Value-based price
Anchors a price ceiling on comparator standard-of-care cost plus incremental quality-adjusted life years at a willingness-to-pay threshold, then reconciles that ceiling against the observed international net-price basket and shows the thresholds other jurisdictions apply.
Needs
A therapeutic class — a pre-launch asset has no price of its own, so the class’s net-price median is the stated proxy — or your own target price, which switches the analysis into live reconciliation against it.
Standard of care
Derives the marketed treatment set for the drug’s therapeutic class from the competitor warehouse and scores how well-served the indication currently is, giving you the incumbent set your asset would have to displace.
Needs
The therapeutic class. This is a marketed-competitor-derived proxy for unmet need — it is explicitly not a guideline-verified line-of-therapy algorithm, and the tile carries that caveat rather than implying a treatment sequence.
Patent landscape & exclusivity
Pulls global patent families for the molecule and derives the loss-of-exclusivity year from the latest composition-of-matter expiry, plus a freedom-to-operate risk band from active third-party patents. The exclusivity year is the horizon the valuation consumes.
Needs
A named molecule and patent-office credentials. Without them the analysis reports no data rather than a fabricated expiry; a pre-launch asset with no public name resolves to its class, and says so.
Where the evidence comes from
Public sources, named
Two lanes here depend on credentials rather than on public access: the patent-office feed and the international price and market warehouse. Where a credential is absent the analysis reports no data. It does not fill the gap with a plausible number.
FDA
U.S. Food & Drug Administration · Weekly
Approvals, labels, guidance, and adverse-event signals (openFDA) used to anchor regulatory-uplift and safety risk.
open.fda.gov (opens in a new tab)EMA
European Medicines Agency · Weekly
European approvals, EPARs, and scientific guidance used to model EU regulatory pathways and country benchmarks.
ema.europa.eu (opens in a new tab)PubMed
NCBI / U.S. National Library of Medicine · Daily
Biomedical literature index of 36M+ citations — used to ground indication baselines and standard-of-care evidence.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov (opens in a new tab)Also read by this pillar
What you get
What lands in the assessment
Every assumption in the funnel is labelled cited or uncited; every price references the basket or threshold it came from; the exclusivity year references the patent family it was derived from.
- A Commercial tab with the revenue funnel, every step showing the assumption and whether that assumption is cited
- Base, optimistic and pessimistic valuation scenarios with a tornado ranking the inputs by influence
- A price range against willingness-to-pay thresholds and the observed international basket, plus the exclusivity year bounding the curve
Read by these expert roles
A role drafts from this pillar; a human reviews and signs off. The sign-off is a 21 CFR Part 11 e-signature on a hash-chained record.
How the roles workHonest limits
What this pillar cannot tell you
Every assessment method has a boundary. Publishing ours is the point — a number you cannot check is worth less than a gap you can see.
A pre-launch asset has no price.
Everything in the pricing analysis is a class-derived proxy until your asset has a label and a payer negotiation behind it. It is a defensible starting range for a board discussion, not a forecast of what you will realise.
eNPV inherits every upstream error.
It is arithmetic over peak revenue, probability of success and an exclusivity horizon. Move any one of those and the answer moves a long way — which is precisely what the tornado is there to show you.
Unmet need is inferred from what is sold.
The standard-of-care set is derived from marketed competitors, not from treatment guidelines. Guideline ingestion for true line-of-therapy sequencing is not wired, and the analysis states that rather than implying a clinical algorithm.
A freedom-to-operate band is not counsel.
A risk band derived from active third-party patent families is a screen that tells you where to look. It is not a freedom-to-operate opinion, and no part of it should be relied on as legal advice.
The rest of the assessment
No pillar decides alone
Each pillar answers one question. The Verdict composes all six into a single go/no-go, with the risks that could still change it.
See a verdict you can actually check.
Send us a protocol — or just a molecule and an indication. We'll return a fully cited feasibility assessment you can trace, line by line, back to public data — yours to defend in a bid, take to your board or investment committee, or hand to a regulator.