By Noah M. Pines and Will Leopold, ThinkGen

Today’s pharmaceutical companies are sitting on an unprecedented, robust pipeline of potential treatments. As a result, we are being asked to conduct more target product profile (TPP) research than ever before. TPP testing through primary research often seems like a straightforward exercise but is fraught with biases, challenges, and pitfalls that can cause the results to be misleading or completely wrong. The most obvious bias is that survey participants – whether health care providers or health care consumers – will spend more time reviewing a TPP in a one-hour interview than they ever would in a real-world promotional environment.