Customer Discovery to Clinical Trial Endpoints
Customer Discovery to Clinical Trial Endpoints
Join Gail Gannon, a seasoned expert in clinical trial design and market strategy, as she reveals how systematic customer discovery transforms clinical trial endpoints from guesswork into grounded, market-ready decisions. This session delivers actionable frameworks that bridge the gap between stakeholder needs and trial design success.
You’ll learn how to conduct strategic customer discovery with patients, providers, payers, and caregivers to inform endpoint selection—illustrated through the contrasting case studies of Leqembi’s functional outcomes versus Aduhelm’s failed surrogate endpoint approach. Gail demonstrates how to apply customer journey mapping to uncover unmet needs, side effect concerns, administration burdens, and cost barriers that must shape your clinical endpoints.
This matters because choosing the wrong endpoint costs millions and delays patient access. You’ll gain practical tools to evaluate payer reimbursement feasibility using Medicare’s QALY threshold of $150,000-$200,000 per quality-adjusted life year, conduct primary stakeholder interviews using the “Five Whys” technique, and leverage AI-assisted research tools to generate competitive positioning evidence.
After watching, you’ll be equipped to validate or redirect your clinical endpoint hypotheses before committing to trial design, apply persona-based findings to strengthen your value proposition, and align your endpoints with what stakeholders actually value—ensuring both regulatory success and market adoption.
Learning Objective
• Explain how systematic customer discovery with patients, providers, payers, and caregivers directly informs clinical trial endpoint selection, using Leqembi’s functional outcomes versus Aduhelm’s amyloid surrogate endpoint as contrasting case studies in what grounds a credible trial design.
• Apply customer and stakeholder journey mapping to identify unmet needs, side effect concerns, administration burden, and cost-of-care barriers that must be reflected in their clinical endpoint choices and trial design.
• Evaluate payer reimbursement feasibility by applying Medicare’s QALY economic threshold of $150,000 to $200,000 per quality-adjusted life year to determine whether their proposed clinical endpoint captures sufficient economic value for market access.
• Conduct primary stakeholder interviews and AI-assisted secondary market research to generate competitive positioning evidence and persona-based findings that validate or redirect their initial clinical endpoint hypotheses before trial design.
Gail Gannon
Gail Christine Gannon, MSPH has spent over 20 years in the industry, with extensive end-to-end experience working with health care providers, hospitals, health plans, NGOs and government organizations, biotech, digital health companies, all making her an engaging and inspiring mentor. She is best known as a fresh idea generator & matchmaker, who enjoys partnering great people with great technology. Gail is well connected and successfully matched companies with strategic pharma-partners and investors, e.g. for Daiichi, Abbvie, & Boerhinger Ingelheim. As the Program Officer for Institute for OneWorld Health, she established a due diligence process and secured funding for five drug programs. Gail chairs a BIO educational section “Value, Patient Access, & Commercialization”, and is a mentor for US MAC, California Life Science Association, and UCSF Lean Launchpad Bio-entrepreneurs. Gail was a Patricia Roberts Harris Fellow at Harvard University. She also holds a certificate of Honor in Biotechnology from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
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