Skip to content
Ferma White Paper · October 2026

Why CI Teams Get Surprised by Programs They Already Track

How better data and automated synthesis can help CI teams cover more competition at lower cost 
 
 
Authors:
 
Author info

A CI team can know a drug well and still miss the program that matters to its decision. The approved use sits on the watchlist. A Phase 3 trial in an earlier disease stage is attached to the same drug name, and the search never returns it as a separate competitor. 

That gap usually starts with how source documents become searchable records: which sources a provider collects, which details it stores and how often it reviews an entry. When a record loses the detail a question needs, an analyst rebuilds it by hand, and the business pays for the same information a second time. 

This white paper traces where those gaps appear in a live assessment, what they cost a CI team and what changes when checked facts carry forward from one deliverable to the next. 

Download the White Paper

Platform Coverage

211
K+
Clinical trials indexed
489
K+
Conference records across 250+ congresses
15
+
Years of life sciences domain expertise

Ferma WP CI

 

What's inside

Where CI assessments lose detail, and what it costs to recover it  

01
A familiar drug, an unexpected competitor
How an approved Alzheimer's drug can carry a Phase 3 program in preclinical disease, and why a broad disease label is often where the search stops.
02
Three choices behind every drug record
The sourcing, storage and review decisions that determine which competitive questions a record can answer.
03
An IBD landscape, checked against the source
What a same-week comparison of two pipeline searches suggests about the checks analysts still run before a landscape is usable.
04
The cost the business pays again
A practical way to measure the full cost of an assessment, and what changes when one checked record supports the next landscape, profile and briefing.

About Ferma

Ferma is the AI-native intelligence platform for life sciences, a business unit of ZoomRx, backed by 15+ years of life sciences domain expertise. Ferma's Agentic Workflows turn the research, synthesis and delivery of decision-ready intelligence into finished, fully cited deliverables for Competitive Intelligence, BD&L, New Product Planning and beyond. 
Coverage spans clinical trials, conference records, regulatory filings, publications and native-language China sources. SOC 2 Type II certified.