Proof Points
- 30% less time spent on daily research workflows
- 3-4 analysts can now do the work of 100-plus
About Royalty Pharma & Its Mission
Royalty Pharma (RPRX) is a publicly traded company that serves as the world's largest investor and purchaser of biopharmaceutical royalties and a leading funder of innovation in life sciences. The firm takes a disease-state-agnostic approach to investing, meaning it will invest in any therapy or market that it sees as disruptive. Royalty Pharma considers over 400 individual investment opportunities each year. With the cost of bringing a drug to market skyrocketing past $2 billion, Royalty Pharma's mission to fund costly life-saving medicines has never been more relevant.
Royalty Pharma invests in perpetuity, underscoring the need for thorough research and due diligence processes. The company must be able to identify and contextualize every potential risk before acting. Royalty Pharma’s strategy and analytics team is responsible for leveraging data and information to identify and better value potential investment opportunities. Analysts are relied upon to parse and provide insights into Royalty Pharma’s own due diligence processes. The team must comb through more than 100 terabytes of claims data in order to inform research on patient journeys, diagnosis prevalence, comorbidities, polypharmacy, and more. They must monitor for IP developments periodically to guard against loss of treatment exclusivity. And they must ensure that insights are disseminated across the entire organization.
Challenge
The company’s combination of coverage area breadth and deal velocity means its analysts must be able to rapidly synthesize a vast quantity of information across diverse disease states. Yet these analysts were routinely forced to scour a myriad of disconnected sources for data, making workflows slow and error-prone. On top of that, capacity limitations meant that critical processes such as IP monitoring were regularly behind schedule, if they were done at all.
Key Pain Points
- Limited capacity: Just a handful of analysts handle any given due diligence process, leaving little time for each task and causing teams to miss deadlines.
- Fragmented datasets: Data was spread across a dozen-plus different sources, with no unified search capability to bring them together.
- Data security: A vast amount of proprietary information was sitting on company servers and employee hard drives.
- Siloed intelligence: Valuable internal knowledge and research insights that should have been shared across the firm were stuck in silos.
Before AlphaSense, our analysts spent hours scanning hundreds of industry journals just to find that nugget of information that might make or break an investment thesis. Now, with AlphaSense surfacing the most relevant information instantly, we can make informed decisions in a fraction of the time, cutting out tedious manual research and significantly reducing investment risk.
Each diligence process creates an immense amount of proprietary information. Right now, that information is scattered across spreadsheets, presentations, PDFs, doc calls, and other documents. Thanks to AlphaSense's Enterprise Intelligence, we are now able to push it all into one place, and make it searchable by every team, every manager, and every future team.
In a business where any delay in decision-making could lead to a missed investment opportunity or a lapsed patent, the ability to go from question to conviction at speed is a major competitive advantage.
Turning Point
Royalty Pharma business leaders realized the company’s workflow inefficiencies were hurting business outcomes. Yet leadership feared that if they added more headcount, it would compromise the competitive advantage of its lean analyst teams.
The company initially attempted to build an in-house knowledge management platform that would combine its internally generated proprietary information with programmatically available data. But once leaders discovered the AlphaSense platform, they abandoned this project.
There's no point in my team continuing to spend effort building a state-of-the-art knowledge management system when AlphaSense has not only built something better with their genAI capabilities and Grid, but also has all the content we would be looking to include in our own proprietary knowledge base. So we have moved all of that proprietary information over to the AlphaSense platform.
AlphaSense proved to be exactly what leadership was looking for. The platform’s genAI-powered search, automated data extraction, and integrated knowledge retrieval give Royalty Pharma a single, powerful tool to accelerate research and deepen conviction.
Solution
Royalty Pharma saw AlphaSense’s comprehensive genAI capabilities as game-changing, with the potential to compress workflows from days to minutes.
- Generative Grid: A fully customizable table view that pulls internally run expert calls and transcripts from the AlphaSense library.
- Enterprise Intelligence: Allows the secure, automatic integration of internal documents into AlphaSense’s existing library of proprietary, premium content.
- GenAI-powered search: Thinks like an analyst to give use case-specific answers, pulling from verified internal and external sources.
- Workflow agents: AlphaSense’s genAI tools offer end-to-end workflow support, automating common areas of due diligence and amplifying the power of human analysts.
AlphaSense’s genAI-powered search, automated data extraction, and integrated knowledge retrieval gave Royalty Pharma a single, powerful platform to accelerate research and deepen conviction. The team’s ability to ask more thoughtful questions of the content, develop company profiles, understand mechanisms of action, and scan scientific journals has driven positive business outcomes. One example: GenAI helped them identify why a major data provider was not properly capturing a specific disease class, an issue they wouldn't have found otherwise.
Results
- Time savings: Reduced workflow times by 30% through improved access to key publications
- Insight multiplier: Just a handful of analysts can now do the work of 100+ individuals
- Unified platform: Created a shared knowledge base combining internal diligence processes with AlphaSense’s own premium content library, all with a genAI overlay.
- More confident decisions: AlphaSense empowers business developers to quickly understand a company, disease state, and product before initial screening, driving quicker decision-making.
Working with AlphaSense has decreased the time this team needs to work by about 30% by having access to scientific publications, regulatory documents, patents, financial information, sell side notes, broker information — and now the game-changing access to genAI over all of that.
By having access to the programmatically available data, the alerting and the ability to search and pinpoint information on AlphaSense, these teams of just three to four people are as effective, if not more effective, than the 100 people that typically [work in]…business development and licensing activity at a pharma company.
Future
AlphaSense is continuously expanding our offerings to include even more datasets — and Royalty Pharma is eagerly awaiting the results.
I look forward to AlphaSense continuing to build out its healthcare infrastructure. AlphaSense has proven to me that they are experts at curating, staging, and making accessible these large data sets where access to them is going to become not a nice to have, but table stakes.
Where We’re Going Together
- Rethinking due diligence: Royalty Pharma vows that no due diligence process will start from scratch, and AlphaSense helps analysts quickly get up to speed on any investment candidate.
- Leveling up productivity: The AlphaSense platform multiplies the power of each human analyst, helping teams stay lean and efficient.
