Sumant Rajendran
Senior Director, Marketing
Scilex Pharmaceuticals
The Overlooked Opportunity Identifier
Sumant Rajendran describes his role as a marketer as the ability to identify “opportunity pools.” In other words, the areas of opportunity other people have overlooked.
The latest example of that is at Scilex with ZTlido, a topical lidocaine patch used to relieve nerve pain following healing from shingles. Previously, ZTlido’s calling card was the fact that it sticks better than its generic competition. But Sumant saw another angle that everyone (including the KOLs) had overlooked: ZTlido is arguably as efficacious—if not better—than Lyrica (pregabalin) the blockbuster gold standard drug for treating neuropathic pain that has now gone generic. But it goes beyond even that.
ZTlido can be combined with gabapentinoids based on mechanism of action (MOA), leading to explosive efficacy, while allowing clinicians to lower the gabapentin dose, thereby reducing risk of systemic adverse events. Going even further, data also shows that combining these two therapies can dramatically reduce the use of opioids, so you are essentially killing two birds with one stone.
Now Sumant is relaunching the brand a little over two years into its lifecycle—and he is doing it during a pandemic. Without great execution, great vision is just pie in the sky, Sumant believes; so he has rapidly pivoted to executing effectively in the virtual environment. Physicians are able to order samples directly from the website, the sales force is trained in virtual selling of e-modules and armed with the ability to send impactful and personalized emails, and a novel remote speakers bureau that piggybacks off sales lunch-and-learns is being deployed.
This is just the latest in a long line of successes for Sumant, which previously included doubling net sales for Aloxi, a treatment to reduce nausea and vomiting from chemo, to $125 million in two years, despite a flat, genericized market. The secret was identifying the overlooked commercial opportunity in the hospital channel space.
The bottom line: once Sumant identifies the right angle, he is relentless in capitalizing on it, and that typically means good things for the brand.
