The best launch plan I saw this year had almost nothing to do with the drug. Most launch plans still read like a countdown to approval. Get the data, clear the regulator, then figure out access. By then

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you're already behind. In rare and GI conditions especially, the people who decide whether a medicine reaches a patient — payers, pharmacists, the specialist who has to change a routine — were never in the room when the plan was written. So the science lands, and the commercial reality doesn't move. The teams getting this right flip the order. They map the access pathway before Phase III reads out. They ask who has to say yes, what evidence that person actually trusts, and where the friction sits in the real-world patient journey — not the idealised one. None of that changes the molecule. It changes whether the molecule ever gets used. Approval tells you a medicine can be prescribed. Access decides whether it will be. Confusing the two is still one of the most expensive mistakes we make. If you've launched in a specialist or rare space — what's the one access assumption you wish you'd stress-tested a year earlier? #MarketAccess #Pharma #Commercialisation