“It costs about $2.5 billion to bring a drug to the market, and only about 30% of those actually succeed or meet their commercial goals when they get to the market.”
Manufacturing leaders typically focus on the technical challenges directly in front of them—process validation, tech transfer timelines, capacity utilization. But understanding the commercial landscape offers critical intelligence for strategic planning: which therapeutic areas will drive demand, what modalities require capacity investment, and how market access pressures reshape make-versus-buy decisions.
Ryan Quigley, CEO of Inizio—a $1.6 billion commercialization services company working with over 700 pharma and biotech clients—offers a window into the commercial trends that ultimately determine manufacturing requirements. His perspective spans both sponsor and service provider roles, including experience at Abbott, AbbVie, and UDG Healthcare.
In this PharmaSource podcast episode, Ryan shares his perspective on pipeline composition, which therapeutic areas will drive the most growth, how regulatory and pricing pressures are reshaping strategic decisions, and why flexibility has become the industry’s most valuable currency.
Therapeutic Areas Poised for Growth
Ryan identifies oncology, GLP-1s, and immunology as the areas with the strongest growth trajectories over the next five years.
Oncology: Multiple Myeloma Leading Innovation
“In oncology we’ll see areas like multiple myeloma grow very strongly in the next couple of years. There’s a huge amount of unmet need in oncology. The science is moving really fast,” Ryan observes.
For biologics manufacturers, this growth continues the capacity pressure in oncology-focused facilities. Multiple myeloma treatments increasingly involve complex modalities including antibody-drug conjugates and CAR-T therapies—each requiring specialized manufacturing capabilities.
GLP-1s Expand Beyond Obesity
While the obesity and diabetes opportunity is well recognized, Ryan sees much broader potential for GLP-1 mechanisms that will reshape multiple therapeutic categories.
“Beyond the core diabetes, obesity indications, there’s a lot of really interesting developments behind the GLP mechanism for obesity-related comorbidities. We’ll see GLP-1s move into early Alzheimer’s disease, NASH, sleep apnea, cardiovascular, renal, and other comorbidities.”
The commercialization implications are huge. “These type of medicines are not just secondary care medicines. They’re not just those specialist-focused medicines. They have the potential to reach a very large target audience.”
This requires completely different commercial approaches: “You will need really clever marketing strategies, different types of ways of reaching patients and reaching physicians.”
Immunology: Continued Innovation Despite Biosimilar Pressure
“The immunology space is super scientific and competitive. But the amount of innovation that’s still coming in that space and the amount of clinical unmet need that still exists beyond the huge blockbuster products that have already turned up to serve patients in that market—it’s will be a really high growth and very competitive area as well in the next number of years.”
Lessons from Blockbuster Launches
Ryan’s experience with major product launches at AbbVie—including work on Humira, Skyrizi, and Rinvoq—offers lessons applicable across the industry.
“As you prepare for launch, it’s essential to think ahead through thorough scenario planning,” Ryan advises. “What you put on paper rarely plays out exactly as expected. Go in with the right ambition and investment—but always be ready for the unexpected.”
Patient Benefit as North Star
“In every single indication, every single market where you can turn up and make a benefit for that patient—if you really stay focused on that perspective, I think you will unlock the true value of what’s there,” Ryan explains.
He also stresses the importance of forward planning even during success: “You’ve also got to start very early. Even though you work on a blockbuster today, yesterday you had to be thinking about what’s the next one all the time.”
The Art of Franchise Transition
Ryan points to AbbVie’s successful navigation of Humira’s loss of exclusivity as a masterclass in strategic planning.
“I think they’ve been the masters at transferring through what was a really important product in the field of immunology to actually navigating the loss of exclusivity on that medicine to create a bigger, better franchise that actually changes patients’ lives even better than what the legacy franchise did before.”
AI-Accelerated Drug Development
Looking ahead, Ryan sees artificial intelligence as transformative but emphasizes measured implementation with human oversight.
“AI has been a fantastic development for the industry overall. It’s not something that’s brand new to pharmaceutical companies. It’s been deployed particularly on the research and development side for years,” he notes.
The key is maintaining human judgment: “It’s increasingly helping people make smarter decisions. Very important to have the human in the loop, but better, smarter decisions all the time.”
The impact on development timelines will be huge. “As we look forward through the next five, ten years, I think the science will move even quicker and faster than before. That will bring in so many new opportunities for the way patients are treated for diseases.”
Ryan points to recent examples of transformational progress that hint at what’s possible. “In certain areas like HIV, the therapies that patients have access to today compared to 10, 15 years ago—it’s night and day, it’s revolutionary for these patients.”
“With the advances and the speed at which science is moving, the opportunity for patients and for us all to live a fuller, healthier life will be phenomenal in the next five to ten years.”
Building Connected Capabilities Across the Drug Lifecycle
Inizio has structured its business around how pharma companies actually organize and buy services—through five independent but connected business units that span medical affairs, advisory, marketing, commercial engagement, and dedicated biotech support.
“At Inizio, we can really help our clients all the way from that phase one in their development process all the way through to loss of exclusivity,” Ryan explains.
The medical affairs team works on disseminating scientific data into the medical community, helping shape treatment guidelines and protocols. “In the last few years, we’ve worked on 450 new novel mechanisms of action that will come into the market in the next couple of years,” he notes.
This pipeline reflects the pace of innovation and the increasing complexity pharma companies must navigate. Unlike the era dominated by a few blockbuster molecules, today’s pipeline reflects extraordinary molecular diversity.
The advisory division tackles pre-commercialization strategy: “We’re really helping our clients ask those really big strategic questions in that pre-commercialization phase when they’re getting ready to develop their market access strategy, their cross-functional launch plans, and when they’re looking to get the right type of market research or benchmarking data.”
For launch execution, Inizio Evoke handles marketing and promotional campaigns, while Inizio Engage manages field teams including sales forces, MSLs, and meetings. “Everything that helps them to engage with the scientific community, we help,” Ryan adds.
The biotech team provides a unified point of contact for smaller companies lacking internal infrastructure. “We can really connect the dots across Inizio to bring that value proposition to them in a very unified and agile manner to keep up the speed of what they need to bring to market.”
