Licensing and partnerships have become central to growth strategies across biopharma, medtech, diagnostics, and digital health. As R&D costs rise and competition intensifies, companies depend on accurate, forward-looking market intelligence to evaluate assets, assess white-space opportunities, and identify high-value partners. In 2025, the healthcare market research landscape is defined by advanced analytics, real-world evidence (RWE), AI-supported insights, and therapeutic expertise that can directly guide dealmaking decisions.
This article outlines the Top 10 Healthcare Market Research Firms for Licensing & Partnerships—selected based on data quality, therapeutic depth, analytic sophistication, track record in supporting BD teams, and relevance to product valuation and partnership strategy.
IQVIA remains the global leader in healthcare data and analytics, offering unmatched scale across claims, EMR/EHR, retail pharmacy, provider-level data, and clinical trial intelligence. For licensing and partnerships, IQVIA’s Connected Intelligence framework allows organizations to triangulate epidemiology, treatment pathways, pricing dynamics, and real-world outcomes in a single ecosystem. This enables rigorous asset valuation and scenario modelling—critical for evaluating in-licensing opportunities, co-development partnerships, and global expansion strategies.
The firm’s therapeutic insights, RWE capabilities, and forecasting platforms support executive decision making from early scientific diligence through commercial assessments. IQVIA’s breadth of longitudinal datasets also gives BD teams a strong evidence base for understanding unmet needs and quantifying market potential.
Clarivate (including DRG capabilities)
Clarivate’s life sciences and healthcare portfolio provides deep intelligence covering disease epidemiology, treatment landscapes, pricing, reimbursement, and pipeline tracking. Through the integration of Decision Resources Group (DRG), Clarivate offers highly structured clinical and commercial datasets supported by experienced therapeutic-area analysts.
For licensing and partnership assessments, Clarivate’s strength lies in its disease modelling, payer insight frameworks, and competitive intelligence—allowing companies to benchmark assets, validate forecasts, and understand adoption barriers. The company’s proprietary databases and modelling tools are widely used by pharma BD and strategy teams for portfolio prioritization, opportunity screening, and licensing negotiations.
Evaluate (Evaluate Pharma, Evaluate Omnium)
Evaluate is a recognized leader in forecasting, consensus modelling, and pipeline intelligence—making it essential for dealmakers assessing commercial potential and probability of success (POS). Its Evaluate Pharma platform integrates asset-level forecasts, analyst consensus estimates, company financials, and competitive intelligence into one environment.
Evaluate’s combination with Biomedtracker enhances visibility into catalysts, clinical milestones, and risk-adjusted valuation models commonly used by investors and corporate development teams. For licensing and partnerships, Evaluate is particularly valuable for identifying assets with favourable risk profiles, benchmarking market expectations, and validating revenue projections that underpin deal structures.
DelveInsight stands out for its deep therapeutic specialization, making it especially valuable for BD teams requiring granular, disease-level intelligence. The firm provides rich epidemiology models, KOL-driven analysis, detailed pipeline landscapes, clinical trial assessments, and competitive benchmarking that help organizations identify high-potential assets and partners.
DelveInsight’s strength is its ability to combine market research with tailored consulting, giving teams actionable guidance for licensing evaluations, target prioritization, and opportunity mapping. Their reports and custom research often include product-level insights, market sizing, uptake expectations, and unmet needs—essential inputs for early diligence and partnership strategy.
For mid-sized and emerging biopharma companies, DelveInsight offers a cost-effective, agile approach to gathering strategic intelligence across oncology, rare diseases, immunology, neurology, ophthalmology, and other high-growth therapeutic areas.
Informa Pharma Intelligence, known for brands such as Citeline and Scrip, provides world-class clinical trial, regulatory, and pipeline intelligence. For partnership and licensing activities, its clinical trial databases allow teams to analyze sponsor activity, investigator networks, study design trends, and competitive development pathways.
Its regulatory tracking capabilities also support due diligence, providing visibility into approvals, interactions, safety issues, and approval timelines across major markets. Informa’s insights help BD teams assess development feasibility, evaluate competition intensity, and understand potential barriers for in-licensing candidates. Companies planning global launches or co-development deals often rely on Informa’s detailed trial intelligence to validate timelines and risk assumptions.
Frost & Sullivan combines market research with strategic advisory services that directly support partnership and licensing planning. The firm is known for identifying emerging technologies, growth opportunities, and white-space segments across medtech, diagnostics, digital health, and healthcare IT.
Their growth opportunity analytics and scenario-based market forecasting help companies understand where unmet needs—and investment flows—are shifting. For partnerships, Frost & Sullivan offers detailed competitor positioning analysis, market readiness evaluations, and ecosystem mapping that help clients identify promising collaborators or acquisition targets. Their high-level strategic insights make them particularly useful for companies entering new markets or pursuing cross-industry partnerships.
McKinsey & Company (Life Sciences & Healthcare Practice)
Although not a traditional data provider, McKinsey is instrumental for companies needing licensing and partnership intelligence tied to transformation and execution. McKinsey’s proprietary datasets, benchmarking tools, and advanced analytics teams support strategic assessments across R&D productivity, therapeutic area landscapes, launch readiness, and global pricing.
For partnerships, McKinsey helps organizations evaluate the strategic fit of potential collaborators, design partnership models, assess market access barriers, and quantify long-term value creation. Their strength lies in integrating insights with operating model decisions—useful in complex deals such as platform collaborations, AI/tech-enabled partnerships, or multinational co-commercialization agreements.
GlobalData offers comprehensive intelligence covering clinical trials, epidemiology, drugs, companies, and patents. Its platforms are widely used for opportunity screening, pipeline analysis, and licensing evaluations. GlobalData’s integrated view of market sizing, asset-level profiles, and competitive intelligence allows BD teams to quickly filter potential partners and evaluate global development trends.
Their patent and technology analytics also support intellectual property diligence—an important yet often overlooked component of early-stage licensing decisions. For emerging markets and broad therapeutic coverage, GlobalData provides a balanced combination of depth and accessibility.
Kantar Health (now part of Cerner/Oracle ecosystem)
Kantar Health, now integrated into Oracle’s health data and analytics ecosystem, offers deep patient-level insights, RWE analytics, and epidemiology modelling. For licensing and partnerships, its patient data and treatment pathway analysis help BD teams understand how new products may fit into real-world practice.
Kantar’s strengths include market access intelligence, patient-reported outcomes, and prescribing behaviour modelling—all essential for understanding the commercial viability of potential assets. With Oracle’s expansion into healthcare data infrastructure, Kantar’s analytic value for due diligence and portfolio strategy continues to grow.
Syneos Health (Commercial & Consulting Insights)
Syneos Health provides integrated clinical and commercial insights that support partnership evaluations, licensing decisions, and go-to-market assessments. The company’s consulting arm specializes in therapeutic-area analytics, pricing and access strategy, forecasting, and competitive intelligence.
For licensing and partnerships, Syneos offers practical, evidence-backed evaluations of commercial potential, adoption barriers, and payer dynamics. Its hybrid model—spanning clinical operations, commercialization, and research—makes it especially strong for evaluating the real-world viability of early- to mid-stage assets. Syneos’ real-world insights help organizations validate whether a potential asset can achieve differentiation in competitive markets.
What Makes a Healthcare Market Research Firm Valuable for Licensing & Partnerships?
In 2025, the most effective firms share several capabilities critical for BD and corporate strategy teams:
Robust Epidemiology and Forecasting Accurate prevalence, incidence, and addressable patient population estimates are essential for valuing assets and projecting long-term revenue.
Therapy-Area Expertise Licensing success depends on understanding nuances in disease pathways, emerging mechanisms, competitor strategies, and regulatory expectations.
RWE and Patient-Level Analytics These datasets reveal treatment patterns, unmet needs, discontinuation drivers, and payer influence—critical for assessing commercial potential.
Pipeline and Competitive Intelligence Dealmakers must understand not only current competitors but also assets in early-phase development that could reshape the landscape.
Clear Methodology and Validation Models and forecasts must be transparent, evidence-based, and defendable—especially for investment committees and governance boards.
Choosing the Right Firm for Your Licensing & Partnership Needs
The ideal firm depends on the stage, scope, and complexity of your objectives:
For deep therapeutic insight and targeted due diligence DelveInsight or Syneos Health
For global data scale and high-fidelity forecasting IQVIA or Evaluate
For clinical trial benchmarking and regulatory insight Informa Pharma Intelligence
For strategic partnership models or portfolio transformation McKinsey & Company
For technology-driven or medtech-focused collaborations Frost & Sullivan
For broad competitive screening and pipeline visibility GlobalData or Clarivate
Most leading organizations use a hybrid intelligence stack—combining large data providers with specialty firms for deeper therapeutic or strategic insight.
Final Thoughts
Licensing and partnerships remain among the most powerful levers for growth in healthcare. But in an environment where clinical timelines, payer expectations, and competition shift rapidly, companies must rely on high-quality, data-rich market research to guide decisions.
The top firms listed here—ranked for their data strength, analytic depth, domain expertise, and strategic value—represent the most capable partners for BD, corporate strategy, and investment teams in 2025. Whether conducting early diligence, assessing market viability, prioritizing assets, or negotiating deal terms, these firms deliver the insight needed to make confident, evidence-backed decisions.