How Behavioral Science can Turn Research into Revolution in the Oncology Launches: The Mark of Varun Sharma at Gilead Sciences

According to Varun Sharma, the Director of Business Analytics in Gilead Sciences, the best lessons are experienced through watching people and not through what they say. Varun has extensive experience in the pharmaceutical world, and now, armed with more than ten years of experience, he has been leading the way in incorporating behavioral science into market research, core shifts in how Gilead is bringing oncology therapies to the patients around the globe.

A New Paradigm of Customer Focused Launch Strategies

In a world in which the oncology markets are highly competitive with competing treatments, traditional market research means, such as surveys, focus groups or structured interviews never seem to get closer than the surface level of rationalization. Varun Sharma understood that such methods were far from unmasking the subconscious forces that underlie the way physicians write prescriptions. User observational techniques and anthropological approaches become part of the launch playbooks that Gilead has developed, because by inserting this as part of the launch playbooks, this has permitted teams to get under the surface, to discover the underlying motives as well as pathos and pressures to find the true motivation of making real-world decisions.

Varun says, to really have a connection with our customers we will have to be able to drop the checkbox answers and really look at the undercurrents that drives their decisions.

With his direction, the global oncology analytics unit of Gilead changed the mode of static segmentation to dynamic behavioral profiling. Embarking on in-field ethnography and augmented by the methods of the indirect questioning, the team of Varun has constructed rich contextual writings about the workflows of the physicians. This intelligence applies to the range of formulations they prefer, through to specific HCP messaging, so that every launch not only makes an emotional, but also clinical connection.

Bridging The Gap: Self-Reporting Bias to Real world Evidence

Where the usual suspect with physicians is the conflict between what they report in surveys and what they do in practice, one of Varun projects dealt with that. The conventional feedback loop indicated that guideline adherence was the best regimen choice driver but the post-launch performance evidence portrayed a different picture.

Self-Reporting vs. Actual Practice: Doctors tend to exaggerate their use of protocols, and observational data demonstrates a high comfort bias when they are short on time and administrative burden; clinicians tend to adopt regimens, which are most familiar to them.

This War Or That: As the leader of a team, Varun utilizing the device of psychological discourse analysis, identified the nuances of hesitation, language patterns, and placement of elements in the environment, which indicated pressure and exhaustion in judgment. These results led to more basic decision aids and computer-based tools to mitigate cognitive overload of consultants.

Varun recalls, We specifically wanted to seize the moments that doctors could not fully express to us, the rituals of observing at a glance, the home settings on an electronic health record, the unexpressed wish to be efficient.

Through incorporation of this set of behavioral markers into the forward predictive models, the team at Varun was able to facilitate the teams involved in commerce to more acutely distribute resources, as well as helping to ramp up product adoption.

Contextualization of the Oncology Care: Cultural and Cognitive Motivations

The behavioral science framework created by Varun goes beyond personal preferences into the macro-level cultural and systemic insults. His group cooperated with anthropologists and engaged in immersion research in various treatment practices, including underprivileged communities and oncology centers in inner-city academic institutions.

• Cultural Norms and Stigma: In the case of treatments of stigmatized cancers, including that of head-and-neck or lung oncology, his staff found that patients avoided discussing treatment due to stigmatization. In realizing this, marketing units have revised patient support programs such that they incorporate discrete digital touchpoints and peer-to-peer networks
• Workflow Realities: In clinics with large quantities of traffic, sales staff would be trained to place main messages at natural workflow stopping zones, instead of presentations. Varun observes, “We needed to visit physicians where they really work, not in set up rooms.”

Panaging launch efforts in real-world clinical settings, Varun has made sure that the messaging of commercial teams answers not only to the goals of the medical world, but also to the actual personal experience of care providers and patient consumers.

Changing NSCLC Launch Conversations

In a late-stage, non small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) product launch, Varun and his team used a meld of ethnography, discourse analysis and secondary claims data to chart the changing preferences of both physicians and patients.

1. Early-Stage Alignment: The HCPs and patients had a survival-driven outlook at the start of first-line treatment: their language was coloured in metaphors of fighting and moving forward.
2. Post-Progression Divergence:Once the first-line treatment failed, patients prioritized matters of quality of life--they wanted less complex regimens and a more comprehensive sense of care. Nonetheless, this emotional pivot was never brought out in most of the discussions that were happening among oncologists due to the focus on efficacy in this approach.

Bringing Insights to Activation: Activation of Behavioral Science

Mastering research is not the only vision that Varun aims at; His ideas include the incorporation of behavioral insights in each research commercial lifecycle:

• Forecasting, Scenario planning: Behaviorally rich models estimate market take-up in different messaging scenarios, as well as different access conditions.
• Field Enablement: Brand leads can use custom toolkits (swipe-through e-book-style apps that support industry-specific and brand-specific toolkits fashioned to aid in decision-making processes); micro-nudges result when leads provide input in real time.

Cross-Functional Alignment: Having collaborated with the R&D and medical affairs departments, Varun sees that the start-up strategies consider the behavioral insights and the emerging clinical results.

These have enabled him to lead Gilead to accurately, swiftly, and compassionately deploy commercial excellence worldwide and establish a new bar in the drug industry in terms of the commercial excellence of his recruitment.

Closure: Mapping the Future of Pharma Commercialization

An alumnus of IIT Delhi, Varun Sharma is a man of many firsts an accomplished blockbuster product launches in the fields of oncology and virology, the biggest challenges Varun overcame are the years of experience he has under his belt (more than a dozen) and the very reason he was able to become a blockbuster product launch man in the first place: the evolution of pharmaceutical analytics, a product-based industry moving over to becoming a people-based industry. His never-ending attention to what really inspires physicians and patients has revolutionized Gilead in market research, forecasting and activation of starts. With the mounting complexity and customization in the industry, Varun helps expound a paradigm shift in the way Pharma companies ought to execute new product launching processes.

Varun advises other industry leaders that the behavioral science is not about equipping our toolbox with something new but rather about redefining how we ask questions, as well as how we listen”

Via the incorporation of behavioral science as one of the fundamental foundations of commercial work, Varun Sharma not only raised the prominence of Gilead Sciences regarding its global launches of oncology products but laid down a path towards a more compassionate, successful, long-lasting future of the overall biopharma industry.