Latest posts
-
Stelios Tzellos | What a Virus Taught Him About Cancer Markets
Before Stelios Tzellos built a single market forecast, he spent years studying a virus. His doctoral research at Imperial College London examined Epstein-Barr virus gene regulation, specifically the molecular basis for why type 1 EBV transforms cells more efficiently than type 2. It is the kind of question that sits far from any spreadsheet or…
-
Stelios Tzellos | How Pharma Decides Which Cancer Drugs to Bet On
No pharmaceutical company can fund everything in its pipeline. Resources are finite, and oncology pipelines have grown so large that even the biggest companies have to choose. Which programmes get full investment, which get held back, and which get cut entirely. These decisions shape a company’s future more than almost anything else it does, and…
-
Stelios Tzellos | Reading the Competitor Pipeline Before It Reads You
A pharmaceutical company can build a perfect forecast for its own drug and still get blindsided. The model accounts for the disease, the patients, the access timelines, and the prescribing behaviour. What it fails to account for is the competitor drug entering the same space eighteen months later, changing the standard of care, and rewriting…
-
Stelios Tzellos | The Market Access Timeline Nobody Models Correctly
A drug can have the best clinical profile in its class and still underperform for a reason that has nothing to do with medicine. The commercial team did not account for how long payers take to decide whether they will cover it. In oncology, where patients move through lines of therapy quickly and treatment windows…
-
Stelios Tzellos | The Drug Isn’t the Bottleneck. The Diagnostic Is.
A targeted therapy arrives with everything in its favor. Strong trial data, a clear biological rationale, and a defined patient group that should respond. The forecast looks excellent. Then uptake stalls, and the reason has nothing to do with the drug. The companion diagnostic that identifies eligible patients is not being ordered often enough in…
-
Stelios Tzellos | Why Real-World Evidence Keeps Surprising the Forecasting Team
A drug performs beautifully in its clinical trials. The endpoints are met, the safety profile is clean, and the commercial team builds a forecast around the trial population. Then the drug reaches the market and behaves differently. Patients are older, sicker, and more varied than the trial cohort. They miss doses. They have conditions the…
-
Stelios Tzellos | Can AI Forecast an Oncology Market, or Just Speed Up the Wrong Answer?
Every pharmaceutical analytics team has someone making the case for artificial intelligence right now. The pitch sounds appealing. Feed a model enough historical launch data, clinical readouts, and prescribing trends, and it returns a forecast in hours instead of weeks. The promise is speed, and speed is hard to argue against when a portfolio decision…