A global biopharma’s U.S. market development team sought to grow awareness, testing, and diagnosis of chronic kidney disease (CKD) ahead of a forthcoming therapy, aligning health ecosystem stakeholders around earlier detection and new treatment pathways in an already complex marketplace.

The Challenge

CKD is widespread yet underdiagnosed in roughly 90% of cases. Late detection and limited knowledge across testing and treatment at the primary care level negatively impacts treatment options and slows adoption of otherwise powerful emerging therapies. Our client needed a credible plan to create urgency in primary care, orchestrate cross-stakeholder education, and remove practical barriers to testing without brand promotion.

Our Approach

We rapidly built a market factbase and mobilized a proprietary expert network across regulators, labs, payors, medical associations, and prescribers. In parallel, we synthesized competitor tactics and cross-indication best practices to pressure-test activation levers. Our prior work with the client and this CKD asset allowed us to flatten the learning curve and quickly frame timely interim results in one week for a strategy summit and a comprehensive report two weeks later to support annual planning.

Our Impact

We identified three upstream levers, particularly those related to adjacent and well-resourced therapy areas, that would initiate more frequent testing, the utilization of the right tests, and unlock earlier diagnosis and position future therapies for impact on patient outcomes. We also reset the client’s market development strategy from broad disease awareness to a sequenced plan that lifts testing, diagnosis, prescription, and awareness across peer-to-peer, laboratory, and community-level spaces.

These shifts increased decision confidence in annual planning and created a differentiated, execution-ready market development blueprint for measurable value: earlier diagnoses, faster therapy eligibility, and improved patient trajectories ahead of launch.