By Zane Goodwin (’19), Gabrielle Larus (’19), Daniel Edlin (’19), Andrew Clark (’18)
The global focus on health care is growing at an exponential rate, and we are lucky at UCLA Anderson School of Management to be close to so many companies instrumental in driving significant changes in the industry and impacting countless lives. As student leaders of Anderson’s Healthcare Business Association (HBA), we have built strong relationships with many of these companies, and we are always looking for new avenues to expand our networks.
When the opportunity arose early in the fall 2017 quarter to participate in the annual Rutgers Biopharmaceutical MBA Case Competition in Newark, New Jersey, our team — Zane Goodwin, Gabi Larus, Dan Edlin and Andrew Clark — quickly formed with the goal of gaining industry knowledge, helping to solve a real health care company’s business problem and expanding our networks to the East Coast.
The problem presented in the case focused on how Edge Therapeutics, a pre-revenue biotechnology company based in New Jersey, should plan to commercialize its lead candidate, EG-1962. This drug is being developed to improve the safety and efficacy of treatment for patients who have suffered an aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) caused by a ruptured brain aneurysm. While it has been granted fast track designation by the FDA, there are still many challenges facing the company and its potential product launch.
Everyone on our team has health care industry experience, so we knew it would require substantial research and analysis to arrive at a realistic solution. While we were familiar with some of the terminology presented in the case, aSAH was new territory for all of us. We took this as an opportunity to bolster our experiences with the strength of Anderson’s resources, including library databases and industry reports, ultimately making a recommendation to self-commercialize within the U.S. and partner with several large biopharma companies in Europe and the rest of the world. Doing so would allow Edge to take advantage of the domestic pricing and reimbursement landscape to build a small sales force in the U.S. while leveraging larger companies’ global reach to ensure worldwide patient access and steadily growing revenue streams throughout licensing deals.
On the day of the competition, we met students from 10 elite business schools around the country, including MIT Sloan, Duke Fuqua, Yale and Columbia, among others. We also interacted with company representatives from nine major health care companies and consulting firms who served as judges and sponsors of the competition. We provided our recommendation to these judges in a concise 20-minute presentation followed by 10 minutes of Q&A, and we left knowing we had done our best work.
Fortunately for us, the judges agreed: They not only awarded us first prize, but also recognized Andrew as the best presenter of the day! One judge even told us our presentation was among the top three out of all the presentations he has seen in four years of judging this case competition.
Having a passion for something can make long hours working toward short deadlines not only manageable, but enjoyable as well. Our team “gelled” as we sought to develop and deliver the strongest recommendation possible; knowing that Edge was attempting to drastically improve the post-operation outcome of a devastating condition only motivated us further.
We left New Jersey with an exciting win, an expanded network for the HBA and an improved understanding of the biopharmaceutical industry.
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