A successful vaccine business, like any other one, takes creative and thoughtful marketing. Marketing has been popularized by the four P's: Product, Pricing, Promotion, Placement.

Take the time to describe the Product and its capabilities so that potential customers will know how it can help them. Give your product a catchy, descriptive name to help with branding. A drug manufacturer in real life would also train health care professionals on dosage, risks and administration of the vaccine.

The Pricing of a vaccine is the most important decision you will make with regards to your company's business, reputation, and credibility. You need to consider many business and non-business factors. Some of the business factors include your internal costs to develop, manufacture, sell and distribute the drug. You want to recover your costs and profit from the hard work and brilliance it took to develop the vaccine. You want to put money back into your company to support more research and development of drugs in the future. On the other hand, you want to make sure your vaccine is affordable so that it is accessible to everyone, which is part of the ethics of drug discovery.

You would want to promote your vaccine. Inform clinics, physicians and the community using all available means of communication like journal articles, mail-outs, emails, television advertising and press releases. Remember that promotion costs money too, and should be considered when deciding pricing.

The Placement of a product involves manufacturing and distribution. It's important to choose a manufacturing facility that can make enough of the product to meet the projected demand at as low a cost as possible. Sometimes, manufacturers place orders with multiple sites as insurance against one site going down due to inclement weather, earthquakes or strikes. Samples of the product must be independently tested for quality. If a bad batch gets through quality control, patient safety could be at risk and lawsuits could follow. Finally, there needs to be a distribution channel to move the vaccine from the manufacturing facility to pharmacies and clinics. These days, companies use computer and Internet based order tracking systems between the company, manufacturing and the clinics. Each dose of the vaccine is marked with a barcode for supply tracking. The clinic scans the barcode as they administer each dose. Once the supply at a clinic reaches below a certain level, the manufacturer is notified to make and ship more vaccine to that clinic.

Aside from marketing, other business issues for biotechnology companies are:

Patent. Vaccines have a Patent Life of 20 years from the date the intellectual property (IP) was granted a patent by the Patent Office. If this patent runs its course, then other companies can manufacture the vaccine as a generic. Since they did not incur R&D costs, they can charge much less for the vaccine than the originator. Many companies will try to extend the patent life using the legal system or slightly modifying the formulation and creating a new patent.

Legal is another important aspect of any biotechnology business due to its highly regulated nature and patient safety issues. Every company assembles a legal team to meet FDA reporting requirements and defend against lawsuits.

Licensing technology to another biotechnology company with more resources to market a product may be an avenue worth pursuing. In this case, BIG BIOTECH pays up front as well as some on-going sales royalties and relieves the smaller firm of the further effort and expense of marketing the product. BIG BIOTECH assumes the expense and risk of taking the product to market but will reap the rewards of selling a proven patent protected vaccine.