The #PHLEX Summit Journey So Far | Pharmaceutical Launch Excellence Summit

The Story So Far - #PHLEX Summit Journey

The Pharmaceutical Launch Excellence Summit came about the way many of our most successful niche events do — by spotting a glaring gap, asking the right questions, and listening carefully to a community that had a lot to say.

At Pharma IQ, we’ve run conferences across the full pharma lifecycle — from R&D and clinical trials to manufacturing and market access. But when it came to launch, we noticed something strange: despite the billions spent on development, and the growing pressure to deliver commercial value fast, there was no dedicated space for the people responsible for the final — and arguably most critical — part of the process.

Working on early-stage R&D conferences, we saw this firsthand. The conversation would build up through development, and then... just stop. Approval would hit, and launch was treated as a handover, not a strategic process.
Yet when we started speaking to industry brand leaders, cross-functional launch teams, commercial operations, supply chain, medical, access, and more — the response was overwhelming: launch has become harder, more complex, and more make-or-break than ever.

Blockbusters are rarer. Budgets are tighter. Health systems are more complex. And the bar for patient access, pricing justification, and stakeholder engagement keeps rising. Despite this, most companies admitted they didn’t have time to step back, reflect, or build institutional launch muscle — let alone collaborate cross-functionally in a structured way. Teams were reinventing the wheel each time under growing pressure, and nobody had a clear picture of what great looked like.

So we built the summit to change that.

The first PHLEX Summit brought together a passionate group of launch professionals ready to tackle these challenges head-on — not just in theory, but with real strategies, frameworks, and stories from the field. The energy onsite was electric. It felt like we were naming a problem that had gone unnamed for too long — and starting to build the kind of connected, informed launch community this industry needs.

Now, heading into our second year, we’re excited to go deeper. This is more than just an event. It’s a growing movement of launch leaders, planners, and strategists working to define and elevate what pharmaceutical launch excellence really means — for patients, for teams, and for the future of drug delivery.

See you in December!

Warm regards

,
The PHLEX Summit Team