Customer Research and Marketing

Buckle Therapeutics

Mentor

Malcolm Nason, PhD, MBA, Chief Commercial Officer at Buckle Therapeutics

Company Overview

Buckle Therapeutics has developed an innovative way to introduce soluble drugs into the bloodstream utilizing the buccal membrane on the inside of the cheek. There are several promising commercial opportunities for this technology. This externship will focus on commercial development of the first of these opportunities while building evidence to support a successful business model.

Externship Description

The first product that Buckle Therapeutics will commercialize is a naloxone applicator to reverse opiate overdoses and poisonings. Our device offers a key competitive advantage, which you’ll learn about during this externship, and we believe it will have a strong impact on the opioid overdose market, currently dominated by established companies. As a new company with a new product, making clear, strategic business decisions about how to launch is crucial. The first step in this endeavor will be the detective work required to identify the best section of the market as an entry point.

This externship will help to prioritize our product launch by the discovery, collection and analysis of publicly available data. We will be diving into financial documents such as SEC filings of publicly traded companies, Form 990s from non-profit harm reduction organizations, state budget documents, and the recent national opiate settlement. We will mirror those data with human-centric data about public health, harm reduction, epidemiology, and other relevant sources to capture the full breadth of the opiate overdose epidemic. The goal of these exercises will be to:

1. Identify customers who are likely to purchase the Buckle product based on budgets, existing programs and partnerships, and other key features.
2. Match those promising customers with areas of high need or programs of high efficacy.

This section of the externship establishes a plan to achieve a key aspect of commercialization: showing early capture of customers with low customer acquisition costs, and creating success stories to build marketing campaigns to further lower customer acquisition costs. After prioritizing the most promising market segments, we will dive into development of the strategic planning necessary for launch. During strategic planning, we will explore and possibly develop tactical assets for product launch. If time permits, we will test some of these assets with market research.

The skills acquired in this externship are readily transferrable into the private sector in many areas: business development, program management, market research, strategy, business transformation, clinical development, and many others. The basic format will consist of 2 weeks of training and planning, 4 weeks of data discovery and spreadsheet creation, and 2-3 weeks of strategic planning and tactical development. The last section of the externship will be used for the development and refinement of a deliverable which will be presented to executive leadership. While some parts of the externship deliverable will remain proprietary, where confidentiality will be expected, it will have aspects that can become part of an Extern’s portfolio.

Specific Objectives

1. Discover, capture, and organize publicly available financial and human-centric public health data sufficient for performance of quantitative testing.
2. Develop commercial hypotheses about which market segment to target first and test these hypotheses against predicted revenues and modeled costs.
3. Identify opportunities and build the strategies and tactics for successful product launch into a competitive market.
4. Produce presentations of relevant knowledge, spreadsheets and testing macros of proposed business model(s).

Desired Skills

• Dedication and attention to detail
• Organizational skills will be extremely valuable to this endeavor.
• Ability to automate data capture and organization will be a boon.
• Interest in balancing financial and human data to create successful business strategies.