Identifying current neurosurgeons' concerns about cns gene therapy introduction and providing solutions

Abstract

Identifying current neurosurgeons' concerns about cns gene therapy introduction and providing solutions. This project is aimed to understand the main bottlenecks for the implementation of CNS gene therapy on the market due to the anticipation of the limited capacity for the drug introduction. Belgian biopharmaceutical company, UCB, assigned us to understand the current state of the neurosurgical drug injection players and stakeholders and discover which is the current capacity for the CNS Gene Therapy introduction. In this report, we will clarify the main issues for the different players involved in the surgery process. However, we will validate only the constraints with the neurosurgeon's point of view as they are the unique stakeholder on which we will be focused on buse of time constraints, among others. The first part of the report introduces the problem statement of the project, explaining the main research question that is going to be solved: “What are the main constraints and issues for introducing the CNS Gene Therapy from the neurosurgeons' point of view, and how can those issues be resolved?” The second part of the report includes a literature review, that contains the scientific information obtained from the preliminary research. This information is important to understand to conduct meaningful research. Firstly, an introduction of the evolution of the healthcare ecosystem will be given. Next, CNS Gene Therapy will be explained briefly. After the introduction of the gene therapy, the way the drug is delivered to the brain is discussed. Following that, two ways of how performing the surgery are explained and then surgeries that are similar to the CNS Gene therapy injection are introduced. Then the report includes information about diseases that are aimed to be treated by the CNS Gene Therapy – Parkinson and Epilepsy. Engaging in irregularities is severely sanctioned in correspondence with article 64 of the Examination rules. We hereby declare that we have not engaged in any such irregularities. The next chapter of the report is devoted to the methodology of the research. Firstly, research approach of the project is described, indicating that qualitative interpretive science research method is implemented – neurosurgeons will be interviewed to answer the main management problem. Then preliminary research was done, constituting of lectures provided by UCB Coordinator and preliminary interviews with UCB employees. After that patient’s and neurosurgeon’s journey were created for the future research purposes. Then it was important to describe the development of the issue tree, that constitutes the potential issues related to the neurosurgeon’s attitude towards CNS Gene therapy introduction. As for the next step of the methodology, we introduce the patient’s and neurosurgeon’s persona’s that would be used in the development of the screening guide that is used as a sampling strategy to choosing a relevant neurosurgeon for the research. Last parts of the methodology explain the chosen profiles of neurosurgeons that perfectly matched the aim of our project, how the dicussion guide was developed and how we did the focus group for ideas brainstorming. The third part of the report deals with results of the research. First of all, it introduces all the potential issues that neurosurgeons might have towards introduction of the CNS Gene therapy. Then we describe all the results that we received from our main and follow-up unterviews. Finally, we introduced potential recommendations for the UCB company to implement in order to solve the potential capacity problem of the CNS gene therapy introduction. The fourth part of the report is devoted to limitations of the research that we faced during conducting the project.