Here’s how much pharma executives are paying for real-world data — and who they’re buying data from

Pharma companies are paying anywhere from $75K to $5M per year to acquire datasets that can speed up drug discovery, clinical trial design, and regulatory reporting.

Real-world data (RWD) is transforming the drug R&D value chain.

RWD — an umbrella term for patient data mined from health records, insurance claims, clinical registries, genomic databases, and surveys of patient-reported outcomes — was initially used to collect evidence about a drug‘s post-market safety.

Today, these datasets are being used to match patients to the right trials, design study protocols, create simulated control arms in clinical trials, and identify promising drug targets.

Major pharma companies are actively evaluating and investing in RWD vendors. For example:

Pfizer is working with startup Syapse on breast cancer data.
GSK partnered with unicorn Tempus to speed up clinical trials and identify drug targets in oncology.
Sanofi has worked with Evidation, a company that collects patient-reported outcomes, across multiple therapeutic areas for over a decade.

To understand how pharma companies are making purchasing decisions, we mined Yardstiq transcripts — interviews that CB Insights conducts with software buyers — as well as Analyst Briefing surveys submitted to CB Insights by vendors.

Here are 5 key takeaways from this analysis.

The market is fragmented: Buyers find there is “no one-stop-shop” for data in all therapeutic areas. The market may consolidate as vendors try to gain a competitive edge by acquiring more granular and disease-specific datasets. TriNetX, for instance, has made 4 acquisitions since 2022.
Integration with internal datasets: This is a key requirement for pharma buyers, along with transparency surrounding dataset limitations.
Demand for oncology data: Buyers have indicated that there’s an “unmet need for oncology real-world data,” including patient genomic datasets, and are turning to vendors like Tempus, Syapse, and Flatiron.
AI features: From data curation to medical report generation to clinical trial applications, pharma executives are evaluating vendors based on their machine learning capabilities.
Non-standard pricing structures: Buyers have reported that “there wasn’t really a formal buying process” or that vendors “don’t really have a standard [pricing] model, but you can always agree on a collaborative model with them.”

Below, we’ll dive deeper to highlight several key RWD vendors, how much their pharma buyers are paying, and vendor-specific buyer perspectives.

How much are pharma executives paying for real-world data (RWD)?

Based on Yardstiq interviews with buyers and Analyst Briefing survey data submitted by vendors, we found that RWD annual contract values range from $75K to $5M.