Member Spotlight: Nathan Corder
PMSA: How many years have you been in the industry?
Eight years
PMSA: What attracted you to the field?
I ended up in pharma by coincidence. I was working on a PhD in Statistics at the time and happened to have quite a bit of work experience in SAS programming. A local hematology start-up came to our department asking for any student who could work part-time to assist them with QC work on a filing with the FDA. The only conditions were 1) they had to know SAS and 2) they had to be able to start RIGHT NOW! I knew I didn’t want to stay in academia, so I applied. That part-time role in the bio-stats group turned into a full-time position in the commercial analytics team when the drug got approved, and I’ve been in the industry ever since.
PMSA: How did you first hear about PMSA?
I found PMSA organically a few years ago when my team and I were looking to plan out our year’s conference attendance calendar. The PMSA Annual conference happened to be very close by that year. Most of us have academic backgrounds, so this was one we hadn’t encountered before. It was nearby that year, and so we decided to attend. While we still focus on maintaining our academic conference coverage, given the unique perspective PMSA offers, we’ve made it a priority to include PMSA in our list of major conferences too.
PMSA: How many years have you attended the PMSA conference?
This year will be my fourth year.
PMSA: Please describe any current projects you are excited about.
About a year ago I transitioned out of our commercial analytics team and am now supporting medical affairs. Many of the questions are fundamentally the same but with the increased regulatory requirements, medical affairs isn’t able to answer the questions the same way. How do you do promotional mix modeling (MMx) when 1) medical affairs is inherently non-promotional and 2) all of your legacy commercial endpoints (like brand TRx/NBRx) are impermissible model endpoints? Finding a solution that is simultaneously estimable, feasible, and permissible has been a fascinating problem to pursue.
PMSA: Do you have any predictions for the future?
Last year, two major manufacturers entered the space of direct-to-consumer distribution. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think more companies may follow suit in the coming years if it is the right thing for their brands and the patients they support. What I think that will lead to, though, will be a significant disruption in the ability for open claims data to capture the extent of coverage within markets that have major DTC distribution. At that point, it would not surprise me if data vendors from the logistics market stepped in to fill the hole that the disruption in reimbursement claim data has caused. Imagine buying data from Amazon or Walmart or UPS that augments your claims data based on the fulfillment of product (as opposed to the prescribing of it). Depending on how much volume goes through these new DTC distribution channels, I can foresee our analytics environment having to get quite creative if we are going to attempt to retain the same data capture rates we have presently.
PMSA: What are your hobbies?
As anyone with kids under 5 will probably agree, “hobbies” are really something you aspire to more that “have” for a little bit. I’m right in the thick of that, but I will say, the one hobby I have been able to keep ahold of has been cooking. I’ve even been able to start involving my older daughter in the kitchen with some of the non-knife prep work. I like to think it’s cooking with dad that has led to her asserting on multiple occasions that her favorite food is broccoli.