January used to be one of the most exciting times for the biotech industry, kicking off another new year with new perspectives and goals, and meeting with our best friends in San Francisco during the JP Morgan Healthcare Conference. This didn’t happen for a while, because of the pandemic. This year, for the first time in three years we were able to have in-person meetings, receptions and parties, and come back to normal, or, kind of normal. It appears that the biotech industry is nowhere near where it used to be before the pandemic, and even the world itself is said to be headed to a deeper recession.

Nevertheless, e-Projection is entering into a new chapter of its business this year. The number of our teammates is now more than a dozen, and we are in a new office in the heart of Tokyo. In the coming months we will release a cloud-based business intelligence tool named e-Pharmascape, for the purpose of serving our clients with more clarity in the Japanese pharmaceutical market. This will be the very first attempt for us to create a tangible asset that will elevate the quality of our services to a next level. This tool will also be the first of its kind to understand the market from the most detailed SKU level of products to the highest level of the summary of the total market, and with full clarity to our international audience, since the tool will be entirely in English. Users will be able to slice the market by indications, by company, or by therapeutic areas, and each product will have a short-term forecast with it (currently we are thinking of a five-year forecasting period). Our plan is to continue adding in more and more features even after the release of the first version; an agile development process; adding pricing information, products under development, product margin information and even translation of the label. We are thrilled and excited to see this coming to shape and to be able to show it to our customers.

The Japanese pharmaceutical market will face some challenges in the coming years. However, we remain confident that this market will continue to be one of the largest and the most important country markets for pharmaceuticals with true innovation helping patients with unmet medical needs. We look forward to working with all the innovative biotechs and pharmaceutical companies all over the world.

Tosh Nagate, Chief Executive Officer, e-Projection K.K.