India Rare Disease Market Assessment: Mapping an Unfamiliar Market from Scratch

Parthsarthi joined this engagement as the analyst on a team of one consultant and one manager. The brief was to assess whether India was a worthwhile market for a Japanese pharma group looking to introduce a drug for XLH, a rare bone disease that primarily affects children. The Indian rare disease landscape was fragmented and poorly documented, and Parthsarthi had no prior background in healthcare.

He started from raw briefs and built the research architecture from the ground up. He mapped the Indian insurer landscape, identifying what private and public coverage looked like for high-cost rare disease treatments. He researched government reimbursement schemes, cataloguing which policies could cover the magnitude of reimbursement the drug would require. He also ran drug pricing analog studies, comparing similar rare disease drugs launched in other markets to understand pricing trajectories and uptake patterns.

In parallel, he owned the expert interview campaign end to end. He reached out to expert networks, selected the right key opinion leaders to speak with, led the interviews, took notes, and followed up with experts on clarifying questions. One interview surfaced a difficult judgment call: an expert who had confirmed strong credentials in screening turned out to have limited relevant knowledge once the call began. Parthsarthi made the call to close the interview early, communicating directly that the team had what it needed, even when the expert pushed back on the shortened duration.

The synthesis work brought together the insurer landscape, government policy findings, and pricing analogs into a client-ready deck. The team's conclusion was that India was a viable market, and the client found the research substantive enough to re-engage L.E.K. for the next phase: GTM strategy for the drug's India launch.