For all those companies wondering whether to dip their toes in the water with social media or not, this fun presentation provides some interesting stats and snippets that illustrate some useful pointers.
Well, it is summer Friday, right?
One of my favourite online tools for topline CI research is Google Trends. It's a nifty, easy to use little tool that can help set the scene for some data driven analysis. After all, there's nothing worse than 50-100 pages of closely written text and tables and wondering if you can see the wood from the trees.
Take a look at what Google Labs have done with online Flu data and generated some interesting trends based on seasonal patterns:
They even have a short video to explain more abut the project.
Now, granted, there will be more data on big topics that the general public is interested in but I also use Google Trends a lot in my consulting work – a picture tells a thousand words and puts things firmly in context for discussion. For example, after the recent ASCO conference on cancer data, someone wanted to know what the impact of the new data in maintenance therapy in advanced lung cancer had. The answer? Very little really, as this graph clearly shows:
In fact, the negative news (F) around the adjuvant data in colorectal cancer had a small impact, but the 'noise' for colorectal cancer compared to lung cancer is generally much smaller as this graph shows:
This kind of historical data for global search allows you and I to look at trends and patterns – for free. That's probably the coolest thing about it because open science and access to this kind of data is awesome compared to 10 or 20 years ago when you had to have money to buy some vendors report that might not give you what you need anyway. In this age of self directed research, you have an enormous database of information at hand whenever you need it. It is also miles better than old fashioned search on Google, Yahoo! or whatever engine you choose.
Personally, I've also become a big fan of the Wolfram Alpha search tool for computational data – pages and pages of links do not turn me on but a neat page arranged with relevant tabulated or graphical information is much more cool and interesting. While travelling the other day, I needed to know the figure for lung cancer deaths in the US but didn't have my trusty PDF from the American Society of Cancer Facts and Figures handy. So I used Wolfram Alpha on my iPhone and got what I needed in seconds without having to click on Google links – brilliant!
Now, the information computed was just what I needed, but it would have been even more useful with a side by side table of incidence figures, not just mortality. Fortunately, I happen to know that they are about the same in lung cancer because patients live about a year, but that's not the case for all cancers. No doubt the tool will get even more useful with time.
Overall, these tools are really for finding trends and patterns in science data so you could use them for just about anything you might be interested in, such as diabetes, for example. Recently, a PR firm asked me whether people really distinguished between Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes. I had absolutely no idea, but the Google Trends graph was most instructive, especially as it was also clear that then trend for this disease since 2004 was generally in the downwards direction, possibly reflecting a lack of noise about new therapies:
There are plenty of other tricks you can use with Google Trends to slice, dice and parse the data, including excluding search terms, specifying time periods, look at regional differences etc, all on your desktop!
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This morning I was browsing my Google Reader while deciding whether or not to go out for a bike ride before the sun scorches the park and everything that's in it, when I came across an interesting blog post from Richard Heale, a digital agency expert. In it, he was discussing the challenges digital marketing agencies face with Pharma companies and differences in culture that may arise:
That singular thought also sums up the divide in Pharma incredibly well too. We are at the cross roads between the traditionalist baby boomer generation in senior management positions and the up and coming kids who are Gen X and Y – they are think differently, not only from experience, but also from the web culture they grew up in.
If you look at the precise years, I'm one of the last of the baby boomers, being born in the very last year with a couple of months to go, yet I often find myself more in common with Gen X than the 'old farts' as they love to label themselves, who focus on traditional media, DTC and all that goes with it. The world has changed. Social media and the new digital age has ensured that. Things are much more fast paced, you can monitor and track progress by computer rather than laboriously Google by hand in a darkened cave somewhere.
The other week, I was meeting some Pharma people and we were discussing competitive intelligence. Not the old fashioned, primary research of phoning around kind of intelligence, but using modern computing, alerts and database search techniques to find accurate, essential information at the press of a button. They were freaked. Completely. Partly awed, partly wowed and partly scared because their world is changing fast and that makes them uncomfortable. Suddenly, the vendor is in a different place, a smarter, faster, altogether wilder place with real time information. Yes, real time. That's the new future technology that's happening right here, right now. Look at Google Wave, at Twitter, at Friendfeed and all sorts of other web 2.0 tools you can use to your advantage, if you know how. A few clicks and you're done.
If I were still on the Pharma marketing side, I'd want a cool vendor like that, getting me real time alerts and accurate, referenceable information I can trust for a much cheaper price. Who said telephone convos or emails from sources were accurate? Actually, they're not; they're subjective and highly susceptible to hearsay, yet traditionalists swear by this primary research approach and often make multimillion dollar campaign decisions on the back of them. Ye gads.
Image by LensENVY via Flickr
Going back to digital marketing approach mentioned earlier, it occurred to me that the traditionalists see this as really just websites, branded or unbranded, and often not as something effective either. In many ways, that's quite true because in the web 1.0 world, pushing information without engagement doesn't work very well. Why? It's biased, it's sponsored, it doesn't let the consumer or HCP engage in a dialogue and quite simply, they aren't fooled by push marketing anyway. When on earth are the patient advocates in this model? Yet learn to listen, engage and work with them in new ways and they will often be your best friends and promoters.
Now imagine some of the new web 2.0 tools on Google Groups, Facebook, YouTube, blogs etc etc (assuming comments are enabled), then you can get a very different type of interaction and feedback. Scary? You betcha, but as more young marketers and PR people start running Pharma brands and e-marketing/digital strategy, so we will see a different type of e-marketing evolve, hopefully for the better. I'm thinking of bright, smart and articulate young things like @shwen and @bradatpharma, who get the power and reach of these new technologies and want to help others too.
At the end of the day, after experiencing both sides of the industry, I've long since realised that the pervasive legal conservatism isn't so much of a hurdle, as an excuse, and a rather lazy one at that. Most internal review teams are more creative and flexible than brand teams give them credit for. In order to get what you want, you first have to give others what they want – in this case, some well thought out and reasoned reassurances and action plans for handling things than may occur.
The world is a-changing – the big question is will Pharma change with it or be left behind?
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It's that time of year when the annual American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting rolls around, this year from the heat and humidity of Orlando.
Some people are tweeting the different sessions using the #ASCO tag and others #ASCO09. Still others are just typing ASCO or @ASCO, although the poor organisers might be a little overwhelmed by that as all tweets will show up in their @mentions. Rather than do repeated searches on Twitter, you can follow them all via the handy little CoverIt widget below:
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I was away for the Memorial Day weekend last Friday and hence missed the big news in oncology that Johnson and Johnson were purchasing Cougar Biotechnology for $1 billion. Note the whole company, not just a licensing deal for the promising prostate cancer compound, abiraterone.
Wow.
The data hasn't even been announced at ASCO yet, that's this weekend coming, so one can only speculate that suitors got a sneak peek of the data under an NDA. A billion dollars certainly gets attention and raises the ante for future small oncology biotech deals.
Just now, Cancer Research UK tweeted about the new data:
Twitter is rapidly becoming my real time alert system for accurate competitive intelligence. You can read more about CRUK's perspective HERE, but essentially the data tells us the following:
"Researchers at the Institute of Cancer Research and The Royal Marsden Hospital
tested the drug on 54 men with aggressive, advanced prostate cancer. In
most cases, the cancer had spread around the body, causing many of them
discomfort and pain. The men were given abiraterone daily and, twelve weeks later, were given a PSA test and a CT scan to see if the drug had worked. The scientists found that abiraterone worked for around two-thirds
of the men on the trial, lowering their PSA levels, causing the tumours
to shrink and relieving pain. It wasn’t a permanent cure, as the
effects only lasted an average of 8 months. But, interestingly, for men who carried a faulty version of a gene called ERG, the effects lasted much longer – up to 18 months.
This may not sound like long, but it’s certainly a significant
improvement on what might be expected for men with such advanced cancer."
Regular readers of Pharma Strategy Blog will know that this is one compound I'm quite excited about. The abiraterone data has been consistent and appears to have fewer toxic side effects compared to standard of care chemotherapy, Taxotere plus prednisone, which can induce severe myelosuppression in many patients.
What was particularly interesting about the new data is that patients with the mutated ERG gene appeared to do better on abiraterone than those without. That's a potentially interesting biomarker to look out for because linking a specific biomarker with therapy for patients most likely to benefit from the treatment is increasingly the way to go in oncology. Now, I'm not sure how many prostate cancer patients might have the mutated ERG gene, so will have to research it unless anyone out there knows?
{UPDATE: Thanks to Twitter and Martin Fenner, it appears that the TMPRSS2:ERG fusion is present in approximately 50% of localized prostate cancers according to this paper}.
Hopefully, there will be more information available at ASCO next week, so watch this space.
Attard, G., Reid, A., A'Hern, R., Parker, C., Oommen, N., Folkerd, E., Messiou, C., Molife, L., Maier, G., Thompson, E., Olmos, D., Sinha, R., Lee, G., Dowsett, M., Kaye, S., Dearnaley, D., Kheoh, T., Molina, A., & de Bono, J. (2009). Selective Inhibition of CYP17 With Abiraterone Acetate Is Highly Active in the Treatment of Castration-Resistant Prostate Cancer Journal of Clinical Oncology DOI: 10.1200/JCO.2008.20.0642
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This post was stimulated by Martin Fenner, a clinical fellow in oncology in Hannover, Germany. We 'met' in The LifeScientists room on Friendfeed and on Nature Networks. He won a competition for a free iPhone app, specifically the Clinical Trials app but unfortunately couldn't use it in Germany as it is US-only. His loss turned out to be my big gain because I use the NIH website a lot in my daily job but would never have paid $25 for it. Last night I decided to test drive it and also look more closely at a couple of other medical apps I use. In this blog post, I'll review the clinical trial app and review the others in subsequent posts.
Clinical Trials on the iPhone Home Page:
All new apps start off on my first Home page and get moved pretty quickly if not used regularly. I have a feeling that this app is definitely one for keeps on the coveted Home page.
To start off, you get an easier to use menu driven database, which is intuitive and obvious:
My only beef with the search page is that while you can sort by location etc, you can't sort by therapeutic intervention, as per the advanced search on the web page where there is a list you can click and choose from. This is a major omission because different drugs might be entered by codename, generic or brand name. The app forces you to type in the drug in the generic search box and take a chance. It is more designed for patients this way who might be looking for trials in a particular cancer type, so it is probably a niche grumble, although my guess is that many Pharma people would also search the same way.
Yesterday, I was interested in Bcl-2 type drugs, and specifically, Mcl-1 targeted therapies. Thus I typed in Bcl-2 to see what it would produce:
Ok, it returns a general list of trials involving Bcl-2 therapies that you can scroll through and review. The titles are important – they tell you a lot about the trial. The little note underneath each entry is also useful, explaining the intervention, condition tested and the status of that trial.
Scrolling through, I found this interesting page:
Now, I happen to know that Obatoclax is both a Bcl-2 and Mcl-1 inhibitor and was specifically interested in whether there were any trials in malignant melanoma after reading yesterday that Mcl-1 may be an important target in that disease. Interestingly, I found some trials in hematologic malignancies but not melanoma. That was useful to know.
Suppose one is interested in a particular trial, what then? Well, clicking on one of the above selections gives more details about the trial itself like this:
What's useful is that you can email the trial page to anyone, including yourself for later browsing. Also, if you were doing competitive intelligence on mantle cell lymphoma, this sort of granular information is vital if trials are just opened or recruiting. Knowing when recruiting or the study has finished is also helpful in anticipation of the results and the impact on other therapies and competitors in that market space.
Overall Analysis:
I use the full NIH website ClinicalTrials.gov all the time, but often wish for easier access on the road or while visiting clients. This handy little app will help considerably, especially as it is quick and easy to use. The only downside will be searching a big tumour type such as breast or lung cancer and getting hundreds of entries but as an adjunct for finding specific competitor information, I think it will be useful and definitely a keeper in my app library. Would I pay the hefty $25 price tag? I don't know, it's too early to tell, but I sure am very pleased with my freebie copy courtesy of Martin 🙂
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This blog post is inspired by the enigmatic Eric Garland, who gave a superb presentation at the recent annual SCIP meeting in Chicago. Sadly, I missed the event due to business commitments, but he kindly shared the deck as you can see below:
I'd like to take a couple of general points he raised and relate them to the Pharma and Biotech. First of all, Eric stated:
This is so true. CI is not an academic exercise and most marketing folks are usually intuitively on top of what what's going on in their market. There is nothing worse than spending five or six figures of precious budget only to be told what you already knew. Monitoring studies are on their way out. But that's the big white elephant in the room that many CI people are slow to catch on; companies can no longer afford to spend over $1M in salary and benefits to indulge a group mere academic confirmatory studies. Thus, we find they may well be a dying breed.
The smart companies are thinking differently.
They're integrating CI, landscape assessments, KOL research and highly technical analyses in one project via the market research or marketing departments that helps them understand the bigger strategic issues to enable smarter decision making. We've started seeing more of these complex RFP's coming through lately and they make my heart sing. Why? Because they excite us – it's a chance to work in partnership with the cross functional team and really make a difference – either through identifying suitable licensing candidates that may make a real difference to patients lives or through creatively finding new ways to increase brand revenues. That's where you add significant value to an organisation.
The other idea I liked from Eric's presentation was this chart about how the future of intelligence might look:
The top ideas for the next 1-5 years are already happening now in technical fields such as oncology, hematology, immunology and HIV, as are technological revolutions. As more and more smarter targeted agents are hitting the cancer market, the role of biomarkers, histology and gene mutations are increasingly affecting how patients might be segmented and treated. Technolical advances in cancer research at the molecular level is quite frankly astonishing, although there is still a huge body of research yet to be done.
Gone are the days when new drugs came out and everyone got blindly treated with them, irrespective of whether they could predict whether they would actually work or not. Now you have to understand the science and biology of the disease as well, which is no bad thing. The Obama Stimulus Plan will help in this regard,
With higher priced drugs hitting the market, you'd better have a sensible rationale for WHY, WHERE and WHO your drug might actually be suitable for. The massive block of older baby boomers will soon to be eligible for Medicare coverage, the cost of therapies in the OECD and developing world are rapidly increasing. Major decisions need to be made on rational treatment and reimbursement or the global health care system will be as broke as the banking system. Another bubble could soon be in the making, only this time it's Pharma getting greedy, with inevitable predictable consequences.
Going back to competitive intelligence, how does this all hang together? Well, the smarter companies are using CI to inform business decisions, integrating it with marketing and business develepment/licensing, analysing markets to address health and lifestyle issues and driving the future portfolios for real growth. The slow companies are still out in left field, focused inwardly on 'competitors' and what they're doing. It's no longer good enough to be 24th to market with yet another me-too similar drug.
Innovation, integration and thinking differently will be the keys to success as the baby boomers become seniors in the next few years. That takes boldness and creativity to think outside of the box; it is also a very long and lonely road, but thank goodness there are some enlightened companies out there treading that path rather than be stuck in left field doing the same old, same old.
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Well, it will be interesting to follow the tweets of competitive intelligence professionals such as Arik Johnson, August Jackson, Suki Fuller, Ellen Naylor and others from the annual meeting. I'm looking forward to hearing what's hot and what's not in the CI world.
For those of us not able to attend the meeting, we can follow the news remotely as they relay their their tweets and commentaries either in the widget below or from Twitter Search. Thank goodness for modern technology that now allows us to tweet one meeting live and keep tabs on two others in different cities on the same continent. Amazing stuff!
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For all the Pharma peeps like me who couldn't make it to Boston for Shwen Gwee's Unconference on Social Pharma (Social Media in Pharma) you can follow his tweets and those of anyone else at the meeting in the widget below or use Twitter search to follow the #SocPharm hashtag easily in your web app.
What a week! I'm still in Denver, CO for the American Association of Cancer Research meeting (#AACR), which you can follow in the blog post widget further down the page. It's an exciting meeting – mTOR, HDAC and biomarkers are the hot topics at this years annual meeting. More on those later when I get time to write some more detailed posts about the the data.
It's triple play week and the other big conference happening at the same time is the Society of Competitive Intelligence annual meeting in Chicago. You can follow that meeting using #scip or #scip09. I'll be posting a CoverItLive widget for easy tracking of that event in a moment.
Meanwhile, do join in remotely and ask @shwen questions about social media in pharma – just remember to use the #socpharm tag in your tweets to make it easy for people to follow all the conversations.
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Image by radiospike photography via Flickr
I'm busy doing a couple of useful little competitive intelligence projects at the moment and it always strikes me how some companies actively use it well in a proactive fashion, while others resent paying any money on what they see as a pointless exercise.
It doesn't really matter how you go about gathering the information, after all this could be focused internet research, telephone interviews, face to face meetings, social media monitoring etc, the important thing is how valuable is the intelligence that was gleaned? After all, if you don’t have the information, imagine how valuable it would be to your competitors?
Intelligence is really another form of gathering customer insights that add value to your business. Used well and judiciously, it will actually save you money in the long run and save you a lot of pain in very competitive market places.
Oncology, for example, is becoming increasingly very competitive in some tumour types as more targeted therapies enter the market and many others are competing for patients in clinical trials. This will inevitably lead to winners and losers. Being ahead of the game means a smarter strategy and often faster, smarter execution.
What about big markets with many treatment options such as depression? Being 20th to market means that you are either going to have to be significantly better than the competition, a game changing breakthrough if you like, or smarter in your approach by using more granular patient segmentation and competitive intelligence to better differentiate your product. There are thankfully new methods of achieving this now, but it means marketing and market research directors need to think outside the box and do things differently. That makes them uncomfortable. They start focusing on the potential negatives and noise, rather than how the tools can help them make better decisions.
Innovation is scary sometimes, but the rewards in terms of smarter and more timely intelligence can far outweigh stepping outside ones comfort zone.
Do you want to boldly define your market or have the market define your brand for you?
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