Research Snapshot: Moisture Analysis of Pharmaceuticals

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In addition to our analytical marketing skills, clients also value the ability to see and interpret for themselves the unfiltered comments discovered during research efforts with both existing and potential customers. Product developers and engineering managers often find new insights – little nuggets of qualitative gold – in our reports.

​Here’s one example from the more than 250 projects we’ve done in technical B2B markets.
Pharmaceutical lab managers on the economic desirability of accurately conducting moisture analysis tests on very small sample sizes of new drugs under development. (Context: phone interviews in 2004)
Pharma Lab Manager #1: “If you could reduce the sample size (for doing moisture analysis tests) and maintain the same accuracy, that’d be really nice. Definitely less than a gram. If we’re doing a pilot lot, where a gram or less of the sample is all you have to work with, then that capability (smaller sample sizes) would be really nice. Typically, we’ll get 100 grams of a sample lot, and have to use 10 grams in one shot in order to run a test. That means you’re only allowed ten tests. Being able to use smaller samples would allow us to accelerate our R&D cycle, because we could test more often.”

Pharma Lab Manager #2: “I’d like to have the ability to test a smaller sample size. That’d definitely help us. Some of these drugs are expensive to produce – they might cost as much as $500 a gram. Typically, we’ll pull 50 to 100 grams altogether to do all our testing. Now, if you’re talking about needing at least one gram to run a sample, that might mean you can only run 50 tests, which isn’t very much – because you’re going to have to do aging studies along the way. But if you can get the (moisture analysis) sample size down to 100 milligrams, now we’re talking about something that’d be an immediate cost justification, because it might mean that we’d have to pull that much less sample in the first place.”

Pharma Lab Manager #3: “We are limited to using very small amounts of substances, like in the neighborhood of a gram. It’d be great to measure smaller amounts of a substance, because R&D drugs are expensive. If we can get it down to 50 milligrams, I would love it. One thing we’re always plagued with in the research mode for new drugs is that we have very small quantities of drugs to test with. It’s expensive to synthesize them. It may cost as much as $5,000 to manufacture one gram of one drug. Just the last test I ran, I know I was outside your (moisture analysis) instrument specs because I used only 100 milligrams.”