Where do patients and consumers go for online medical information?

By MaverickNY on July 4, 2009

This was an interesting question a client asked me recently. The answer wasn't entirely surprising judging from the May Hitwise data below:

Source: Hitwise, May 2009

The Hitwise data featured is based on U.S. market share of visits as defined by the IAB, which is the percentage of online traffic to the domain or category, from the Hitwise sample of 10 million U.S. Internet users. Hitwise measures more than 1 million unique websites on a daily basis, including sub-domains of larger websites. Hitwise categorizes websites into industries on the basis of subject matter and content, as well as market orientation and competitive context. The market share of visits percentage does not include traffic for all sub-domains of certain websites that could be reported on separately.

Let's look at the trends behind the data. WebMD has been around a long time and has built up and earned a reputation for high quality medical information on a variety of topics. It also manages a nice mix between information from health care professionals, sponsored topics and homely down to earth information on very complex issues, including glioblastoma. I have used this tumour as a baseline for comparing the top three sites in what kind of output they generate:

The Mayo Clinic is probably one of the top hospital sites for offering quality and timely information about health related topics, although we can perhaps forgive them for some of their more sensational press release headlines recently, which would be more suitable for a tabloid than a venerable institution. Sadly though, their information on various cancers, including glioblastoma, is rather sketchy at times as this search showed. It is rather surprising considering they are a nationally recognised cancer centre:

RighHealth is a new up and coming player in this field. They also have the Kosmix search tool as their engine driving the data mining, which is extremely useful for contextual medical searches. Rather than have tens of pages about brain cancer, for example, RightHealth organise the information into several categories, making it much easier to decide exactly what you are looking for at a glance, like this:

You can also scroll down and gather plenty of other information about topics relating to brain cancer news and blogs. However, the disadvantage of this site is the weird juxtaposition of totally unrelated diseases appearing in your search. In this case, I'm not sure what crohn's disease and ulcerative colitis has to do with brain cancer and glioblastoma? In the past, I have seen information on prostate cancer pop up in a side box while searching for information on breast cancer. That's rather disconcerting and a doesn't inspire confidence in the search results at all; ideally you want relevant, up to date information on just the words you are searching for, not some sponsored deal that vaguely relates to health matters rather than say, autos or insurance. This is something RightHealth need to fix or at least understand their medicine a little better or it will be a bitter pill for the patient to swallow.

I was a little surprised not to see About.com appear in the list considering it's principal focus is on providing simple and easy to understand information for patients. Perhaps they could do with a web2.0 makeover though because on checking the site the information was rather turgid and poorly presented from a user experience perspective:

A little known secret is that you can find more detailed and relevant information about clinical trials, news, up to the minute conference summaries on medical topics via WebMD's sister site, Medscape. It's free to register and sign in but gives you much more detailed and interesting intelligence on which to make an informed decision. I should disclose that I have written and interviewed key opinion leaders on various cancer related topics, but was using the site independently for some time before that.
Overall, it's a mixed bag for medical searches and easy to see why WebMD dominates this space.

Happy July 4th weekend!

By MaverickNY on July 3, 2009

Image by Stuck in Customs via Flickr

Well, perhaps not if you're British ;).
Oh the irony!

While everyone else here in the US is out celebrating, I'll be working and catching up on the backlog so it will be nice to be free for new projects due to start next week.

Pfizer discontinues Sutent in colorectal cancer

By MaverickNY on July 2, 2009

That was the lead headline screaming from my intelligence database this morning, from several sources. On checking the Pfizer website, to verify the information, I found the following in a terse press release:

"Pfizer Inc announced today the discontinuation of the SUN 1122 Phase 3
trial that evaluated Sutent^® (sunitinib malate) plus FOLFIRI
(irinotecan plus infusional 5-fluorouracil and leucovorin) versus
FOLFIRI alone for the first-line treatment of metastatic colorectal
cancer (CRC). The independent Data Monitoring Committee (DMC) found that
the addition of sunitinib to the chemotherapy regimen FOLFIRI would be
unable to demonstrate a statistically significant improvement in the
primary endpoint of progression-free survival (PFS) compared to FOLFIRI
alone, in this study. No new safety issues were identified."

It would therefore seem that small molecule TKI's are not the way to go with this disease given that Novartis' vatalanib also failed in phase III trials of a similar nature. Genentech's Avastin acts differently, targeting the outside of the receptor as a monoclonal antibody.

For Pfizer, this represents another major setback with Sutent after the recent failure in breast cancer studies. Prior to that, the company terminated two other compounds in phase III development, namely, esreboxetine for fibromyalgia and PD 332,334 for generalized
anxiety disorder (GAD) so 2009 is not turning out to be a stellar year for them.

Chasing blockbusters is clearly not all it is cracked up to be.

Contrast Pfizer's experiences with Novartis approach by following the science rather than the money in a Business Week article. Ilaris, an IL-1 inhibitor, has just been approved by the FDA for a rare autoimmune condition known as Muckle Wells disease. This development follows a similar strategy to that taken by the company with the development of Gleevec, ie focusing on the biology of the disease and finding a targeted drug aimed at the critical mutation. The result? Over 90% of children and adults suffering from the immune disorders
that the drug was designed to treat experienced rapid, sustained
remissions.

The evils of audio translation and it's relation to Pharma

By MaverickNY on June 30, 2009

Image via CrunchBase

One of the big challenges with the Web2.0 world is as more services provide audio through YouTube and other tools, the ability to transcribe and translate into the written word has yet to catch up with reality. We've all experienced the vagaries of Google Translate on websites, but what about audio files?

A while back, I enthusiastically tried out some apps available on my iPhone with the idea of testing them out for authenticity and accuracy for business purposes. These included ReQall and Jott. Now, even bearing in mind I have a British, not American accent, it was a bit of a surprise to be reading a translated shopping list and finding I needed an item hilariously called "break your knees" and other such gibberish. Sadly, I was at the checkout before realising that it actually meant 'frozen garden peas'!

It was therefore with great amusement that I read an interesting article in the New York Times this morning about Google Voice. Here is one such snippet:

"Sunday schnitzels cripples"? Yikes, I'm glad my accent isn't the only one that gets mangled by the computer algorithms!!

A few years ago, we used to send CD's of physician interviews off for medical translation and of course, they would come back with some absolute gems and pearls, necessitating having to listen to the whole thing again to tune up the quirks and strangulated medical terminology. After a while, we began to think maybe it was easier to do it ourselves, at least it would be accurate, if time consuming.

Having just signed up for Google Voice, it will be interesting to see how good the service really is, but raising ones hopes too much is probably not a good idea after reading the hilarity of the examples in the Times article.

How many of us have started to get those small Flip video cameras for posting content to the audio web via YouTube, Qik, UStream, Viddler, Vimeo etc? At $200 a pop for a point and shoot, the costs are now so low that a major barrier has been removed for the masses to take advantage of new technology without needing a Ph.D to figure out the weighty and complicated manuals.

Recently, Fred Wilson of A VC described how the API could be used to get a written translation of a half hour long interview from a YouTube video. Most of us can scan text and mine it for key points relevant to us much more quickly than listening to an audio presentation without written cues.

Many of us listen to Pharma and Biotechnology analyst presentations regularly,
but again, these are time consuming and there is many a time when I
would rather download the presentation and a transcript for easy
offline review while on a train or plane than having to sit through a
live or recorded webcast for an hour at an inconvenient time, and of course, you don't where or when the relevant
items of interest will pop up, forcing you to sit through the whole thing to get a small nugget of intelligence that might actually be valuable.

Still, in the Pharma world, imagine if you could accurately translate audio from the web, which included patient sentiments about brands, diseases or even companies? That would be very powerful indeed, especially with
significant growth in online communication expected to come from video over the next few years. Being able to analyse the ideas expressed in the aggregate would be a really useful tool for social media monitoring.

Watch this space for further developments in the near future.

4 Comments

New cancer treatments – promise or false hope?

By MaverickNY on June 25, 2009

The last week or so has seen some rather garish headlines in the news about cancer treatments currently undergoing testing in early clinical trials.

First up was the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, normally a staid institution renowned for good solid research, but the PR headline screamed pure sensationalism in their press release:

Mayo Researchers: Dramatic Outcomes in Prostate Cancer Study

While we all like to be positive and feel a sense of hope in our lives, what the press releases failed to mention was fair balance, namely that some patients with prostate cancer do actually see occasional stunning results with androgen ablation alone, so highlighting the 'dramatic' results of two patients on androgen therapy plus ipilimumab doesn't really tell us if the results seen were due to the androgen therapy or the ipilimumab. Making waves about two patients does sadly not a cure make; raising false hopes in patients sick with cancer is a little tawdry at best.

The second headline that caught my eye was an email alert from the FT of all places. In it, they were reporting about a trial from another venerable institution, the Royal Marsden in London:

New cancer treatment shows ‘great promise’

This time, the article was about AstraZeneca's PARP inhibitor, olaparib, for BRCA1 and 2 breast cancers, although the coverage did not mention that it was the drugs first clinical trial, but the hype really jars a little. I reported on this data from ASCO in an earlier blog post.

What was interesting that the FT quoted Dr Johann De Bono as saying:

“This drug showed very impressive results in shrinking patients’
tumours. It is giving patients who
have already tried many conventional treatments long periods of
remission, free from the symptoms of cancer or major side-effects.”

Then I remembered he was the same doctor who constantly talked up the Cougar abiraterone trial results in prostate cancer, although it should be noted that abiraterone is part of the same family as ketoconazole, a generic anti-fungal treatment sometimes used to treat hormone sensitive prostate cancer after standard androgen therapy such as Casodex or Lupron and estrogen. The goal of treatment is to keep men who are hormone sensitive on such therapies for as long as possible, since this keeps the disease (and PSA levels) in check. Once they become refractory to treatment, the tumor will start proliferating and metastasize, so having new therapies added to the list to extend and prolong lives with minimal side effects is definitely a positive thing, providing the results pan out that way.

It should be noted that breast cancer is also a disease where patients often undergo multiple lines of therapy and the data with olaparib has not yet been published in full, although a sample of the initial early results was covered in a poster at the recent ASCO meeting. The press release was probably one of the poorest I have seen in a long while – short on the trial details and long on wild hype.

Perhaps sometimes we forget that cancer Institutions are a business in their own right. What these centers are doing is marketing themselves and trying to attract more patients to their clinical trials rather than see community oncologists for standard treatment in the local area. It's an ongoing battle between the two all over America, and while Europe has mainly Academic cancer centres, they all still compete with each other for patients and the flow of money, either from treatments, trials or for research dollars.

The prize for the worse headline on this topic must surely go to Sky News, though, which is rapidly becoming the tabloid of British Television:

New Drug Is 'Holy Grail' In Cancer Fight

This headline struck my Mother so forcefully that she made a rare call to me this morning from 5,000 miles away to ask whether venerable cancer hospitals were becoming the Heroin dealers of medicine. Ouch.

Sensationalism has no place in research and development; patients and
their families deserve better than false hope being peddled so
brazenly; the Mayo Clinic and Royal Marsden should know better than
that. How could they have done better while mataining their
reputations?

How about something positive, but muted, such as:

"Early but promising results seen in xxxxx cancer – more trials needed to confirm findings"

Including
relevant information about the patients, inclusion and exclusion
criteria and the trial design would have gone a long way to putting the
information in context. Still, what do I know? I'm much too old
school for inappropriate, tacky and racy tag lines and sound bites in
the news media.

What do you think?

7 Comments

Health, politics and the science of unreason

By MaverickNY on June 25, 2009

Last night I was thinking that it's been quite a week with one thing and another and only Wednesday reached.

In fact, the stars must be out of alignment or something because there seems to be rather a lot of madness and insanity going on at the moment… The barbaric repression of the Iranian people to the running out of budget in California, politicians going AWOL, politicians in Albany behaving like naughty infants and Senator Claire McCaskill of MO observing the obvious that passing a new Health Care bill will be difficult at best. Granted some of these examples of the week that was seem to be going from the ridiculous to the inane rather than sublime, but it does make you wonder sometimes whether people have any common sense left.

I don't normally write about politics, but as an outsider, American politics has always struck me as being about vested interests and big business. The little guy doesn't stand much of a chance, no more than ordinary Iranians on the streets against the butchers of the Basij. The odds are heavily stacked against them from the beginning. That doesn't make it right, of course not, but give me 10 caring people who want to make a difference to others than 100 ruthless Republicans bent on their own self interests.

For any major changes in the Health Bill to survive intact, Obama needs to lead and drive it through assertively with a majority in his favour, or it will flounder amid GOP and Lobby shenanigans. It's a tough order, but we will see what this Administration is made of and what sort of tone it will set for the next 3.5 years.

The Constitution of the United States refers to "We the People" not "We the HMO's" or "We the industry Lobbyists", but somehow in the end, individual Senators ultimately vote for what will likely re-elect them again, not necessarily what is the right thing to do for the greater good. Think about it, how many Senators in tobacco country will vote against more stringent tobacco or smoking bills, or those in Motown voting for less Union powers, for example? It simply isn't going to happen and it would be naive to think otherwise. Real change only happens when the People decide en masse to get up and DO something about it, rather than vote for change and then sit back and expect politicians to enact it. That way lies apathy and resumption of the status quo.

There are some good examples of business people doing good things in politics, though. Look at Mayor Bloomberg in New York, for example. The other day I was struck at how clean and pleasant it was to eat out in the Big Apple unhindered by pollution from second hand cigarette smoke. As I walked along Bleecker to the Christopher Street Path station, I noticed a sign in a junk food restaurant displaying calorie content for all the items on the menu. You don't see that sort of relevant consumer information in New Jersey, only half a mile across the river. It was shocking enough to make me stop in my tracks on the street: 700 calories for a burger? Without the cheese? Yikes.

Imagine then, my interest in an article in The Lancet was more acute this morning on seeing a headline scream:

"Effects of bariatric surgery on cancer incidence in obese patients in Sweden (Swedish Obese Subjects Study): a prospective, controlled intervention trial."

Obesity is known to increase the risk of many types of cancer, but it has been unclear whether surgery to address the problem could also cut the risk of cancer. The Swedish study showed that weight-loss surgery was associated with a 42% reduction in cancer levels in women.

What is interesting is when you juxtapose this sort of information with the news media such as the Washington Post reporting on:

"A majority of Americans see government action as critical to
controlling runaway health-care costs, but there is broad public
anxiety about the potential impact of reform legislation…

Most respondents are "very concerned" that health-care reform would
lead to higher costs, lower quality, fewer choices, a bigger deficit,
diminished insurance coverage and more government bureaucracy."

There is absolutely nothing in there about people accepting more personal responsibility for their health and well being, of connecting the dots between health, disease, lifestyle and ultimately costs. Containing drug budgets won't solve the real root of the problem: we need to get more Americans healthier and fitter, not spend less and change nothing else.

Meanwhile, the proposed Public Plan will probably derail and undermine the wider changes inherent in the health care bill by fracturing uneasy consensus and escalating the debate into shrill rhetoric as politicians scramble to defend their turf and their jobs rather than focusing on the broader issues of what's the right thing to do for the People. But that's politics for you.

Sjöström, L., Gummesson, A., Sjöström, C., Narbro, K., Peltonen, M., Wedel, H., Bengtsson, C., Bouchard, C., Carlsson, B., & Dahlgren, S. (2009). Effects of bariatric surgery on cancer incidence in obese patients in Sweden (Swedish Obese Subjects Study): a prospective, controlled intervention trial The Lancet Oncology DOI: 10.1016/S1470-2045(09)70159-7

VEGF update from ASCO 2009

By MaverickNY on June 19, 2009

After the recent success of Genentech's Avastin (bevacizumab) in metastatic colorectal, lung, breast and brain cancers, it was a little surprising to hear that the adjuvant data in colorectal cancer missed the mark, with the survival data not showing a significant benefit to the Avastin arm. The Genentech press release announced:

"Results from a phase III study of Avastin® (bevacizumab) plus six months of
chemotherapy following surgery in patients with early-stage (adjuvant)
colon cancer (NSABP C-08). The study showed the addition of one year of
Avastin to chemotherapy did not result in a statistically significant
improvement in overall disease-free survival (DFS), the primary
endpoint, compared to chemotherapy alone after surgery. Patients who
received Avastin plus chemotherapy had a lower risk of the cancer
returning during the year of treatment, however, the improvement
diminished over the course of the study. No new safety signals for
Avastin were observed."

At the Genentech ASCO press briefing, the lead investigator, Carmen Allegra noted that six events separated the study from meeting the early-stopping rule at one year. It was that close. The one year data showed plenty of hints of significant survival but by the pre-specified three-year endpoint, when there were 603 events,
disease-free survival had ceased significance. The end result
for Avastin was 77.4% versus 75.5% for standard chemotherapy alone.

The difference between taking a look at the interim data and the final analysis clearly shows the benefit of long term follow up in the adjuvant setting because things may not always be as they seem. It will be interesting to see futher analyses to see if any particular subsets responded better to the combination treatment with Avastin.

Meanwhile, VEGF as a pathway has had a somewhat chequered history since Judah Folkman first elucidated angiogenesis as a potentially important pathway in how tumours grow and survive. Numerous compounds have entered the clinic with great fanfare, but successfully navigating the treacherous R&D waters through to phase III/IV has proved problematic. The latest interesting molecule is AstraZeneca's Zactima (vandetanib, ZD6474), a dual-acting TKI that targets VEGF receptor-2 (KDR) and EGFR. It is currently in phase III development for lung cancer and phase I/II trials are ongoing in colorectal cancer, medullary cancer and others.

The big news with this agent at ASCO earlier this month was the ZODIAC, ZEAL and ZEST trial data in advanced NSCLC.

ZODIAC is a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase III
study evaluating the combination of vandetanib 100mg with docetaxel
versus docetaxel alone. The study enrolled 1391 patients previously
treated with one prior anti-cancer therapy for advanced NSCLC. Results presented by Roy Herbst et al., showed that the study met its primary endpoint and the addition of vandetanib to docetaxel resulted in a
statistically significant improvement in progression-free survival
(PFS), the length of time a patient lives without their cancer growing:

PFS 14.0 weeks vs. 17.3 weeks (HR 0.79; P<0.001) in favour of vandetanib.

An update on the survival data is expected be available later this year.

ZEAL (ZACTIMA Efficacy with Alimta in Lung cancer) is a randomised, double-blind, placebo-controlled Phase
III study evaluating the combination of vandetanib 100mg with
pemetrexed versus pemetrexed alone in patients with locally advanced or
metastatic NSCLC, treated with one prior anti-cancer therapy. It
enrolled 534 patients at 160 centres across 23 countries.

The data from ZEAL followed the same trend of ZODIAC, although the primary endpoint
did not reach statistical significance in the study, despite median PFS of 11.9 weeks vs.
17.6 weeks in favour of the vandetanib plus pemetrexed arm (HR 0.86, P=0.108).

Secondary endpoints in the ZODIAC and ZEAL studies were also reported. They showed
that addition of vandetanib to chemotherapy significantly improved
objective response rate, a measurement of tumor shrinkage:

ZODIAC: 17.0% vs. 10.0%, P<0.001

ZEAL: 19.1% vs. 7.9%, P<0.001

The studies also demonstrated that adding vandetanib to standard chemotherapy resulted
in a significantly longer time to deterioration of disease related
symptoms:

ZODIAC: HR 0.78, P=0.002

ZEAL:
HR 0.61, P=0.004

Overall survival in both
studies showed a positive trend, although they had not yet reach
statistical significance:

ZODIAC: HR 0.91, P=0.196

ZEAL: HR 0.86, p=0.219

Adverse events reported in both studies was consistent with previous studies with vandetanib in
NSCLC. The most common adverse events associated with vandetanib
included rash, diarrhea and hypertension (ZEAL); rash, diarrhoea and
neutropenia (low white blood cell count) (ZODIAC). Incidence of
protocol-defined QTc prolongation was <2.0 percent in both studies
and was not associated with symptoms.

The ZEST (ZACTIMA Efficacy Study versus Tarceva) trial
is a Phase III randomised, double-blind, multi-centre study to assess
the efficacy of vandetanib 300mg versus erlotinib 150mg in patients with
locally advanced or metastatic NSCLC after failure of at least one
prior anti-cancer therapy. It enrolled 1240 patients at 171 centres
across 22 countries.

Results from the ZEST phase III study were also presented at ASCO. Again, the primary objective of demonstrating a
statistically significant prolongation of PFS for vandetanib was not
met in this study. In a pre-planned non-inferiority analysis,
vandetanib was shown to have similar efficacy to erlotinib for PFS and
OS:

PFS: HR 0.98, P=0.721

OS: HR
1.01, P=0.830.

The objective response rate (ORR) and
symptom control were also similar for both treatments ie ORR was 12% in both arms. The most common adverse events observed in the ZEST study were rash,
diarrhoea and hypertension. Incidence of protocol-defined QTc
prolongation was 5.1 percent in the vandetanib arm.

On the basis of these results, AstraZeneca are expected to file with the FDA in the first half of 2009. Other trials ongoing include ZEPHYR and ZETA. Results from ZEPHYR (300mg monotherapy study in EGFR failures in
advanced NSCLC) and ZETA (300 mg monotherapy in advanced
medullary thyroid cancer) phase III studies are expected be available during
the second half of 2009.

Overall, aside from the Avastin data in glioblastoma following on from the recent FDA approval, I thought this batch of trial results with VEGF inhibitors rather dispiriting, but it may be the almost constant rain in New Jersey over the last 8-10 days that has influenced that sentiment.

2 Comments

Medical and science blogging

By MaverickNY on June 18, 2009

This is an interesting slideshow on medical blogging, but many of the comments are just as apt for science blogging too:

Examining the Medical Blogosphere: An Online Survey of Medical Bloggers

View more Microsoft Word documents from Ivor Kovic.

On a related theme, the recent Pew report raised some interesting statistics:

"61% of American adults look online for health information."

I'm only surprised it was as low as 61%. When asked:

"Now thinking about all the sources you turn to when you need information or assistance in dealing with health or medical issues, please tell me if you use any of the following sources…

• 86% of all adults ask a health professional, such as a doctor.
• 68% of all adults ask a friend or family member.
• 57% of all adults use the internet.
• 54% use books or other printed reference material.
• 33% contact their insurance provider.
• 5% use another source not mentioned in the list."

Overall, 37% of adults, or 60% of e-patients, have done at least one of the above activities. But what of social networking sites? Typically, they were used sparingly for health enquiries or updates, according to the Pew Report, but it wasn't clear how they defined social networking. In the same breath, the report noted that:

"Health consumers are often looking for tailored information, searching for a “just-in-time someone-like-me.” For example:

• 41% of e-patients have read someone else's commentary or experience about health or medical issues on an online news group, website, blog.
• 24% of e-patients have consulted rankings or reviews online of doctors or other providers.
• 24% of e-patients have consulted rankings or reviews online of hospitals or other medical facilities.
• 19% of e-patients have signed up to receive updates about health or medical issues.
• 13% of e-patients have listened to a podcast about health or medical issues."

Blogs by most people's definition would probably come under social media, but likely Pew are referring to platforms such as MySpace, Facebook, etc when then mention social media.

One of the things I've noticed in business is that people buy from people; what Rory Murray has described as ROR, or Return on Relationships. In other words, you are more likely to do business with someone you like, trust and respect. The same goes for online interactions – trust in the form of trusted media or trusted links becomes the new currency. As new tools such as Twitter become more widely used, we will likely see a subtle change in how and where people find and seek information via their trusted network of contacts.

This is an inevitable shift as the internet moves towards a more open web, where information is freely traded, but the reputation and earned currency still must be earned, whether you are sharing information about science, medicine or indeed, any form of information. This applies to professionals such as physicians as well as to organisations such as Pharma and Biotech companies. In this day and age authority is simply not taken for granted any more.

The next big thing online

By MaverickNY on June 17, 2009

Twitter is a great tool for all sorts of things ranging from news, information, even inspiration as this tweet this morning from Ann Curry of MSNBC shows:

The other thing that struck me early this morning was reading the commentary on my Twitter stream from the 140 Characters conference in New York. Like many people, I've been wondering what the Next Big Thing is on the web, since there have been peaks and troughs with most platforms over the last 20 years… Usenet, bulletin boards, AOL, Yahoo!, MySpace, Facebook and now Twitter. Most last around 5 years or so, as Steve Rubel pointed out in his talk, but what's the new trend that may emerge? Steve, a PR professional with Edelman, suggested that it might be the Open Web with companies focusing more on building digital embassies or advocates. There are several in the Pharma world already, as I mentioned in a previous post, but you can see similar trends at Comcast with ComcastCares and his team, Scott Monty at Ford and numerous others.

This idea of promotors is a potentially useful corporate model, but a) what happens when the evangelists move on? Do they take that currency with them or does it stay? Having all-stars on your team can be both a blessing and a curse, as many sports teams will attest and b) what is the next useful tool for the masses? How would the open web affect them? Semantic web has been frequently suggested, but I can't really seeing this taking off. Why? It's a bit too nerdy and lacks emotion. People are human, they want to connect and interact with other humans in some meaningful way that captures the imagination and emotion, as Ann Curry's quote from Maya Angelou aptly demonstrates.

We want to feel integrated, connected and inspired, able to converse and comunicate, but we also want ease of use and convenience.

The new next big thing may not even be out there yet, it's just an idea lurking in someone's brain, waiting to happen somewhere in the world. At the moment, I'm loving the idea of augmented reality as the post inspired by @berci yesterday shows. For Pharma and Biotech, it has so much useful practical potential.

What's your idea for the next big thing online?

Augmented reality and Pharma

By MaverickNY on June 16, 2009

This morning, I was fascinated by a tweet from Bertalan Meskó (soon to be Dr Mesko) about Layar, the world's first mobile augmented reality browser. Take a look at this short video:

Now imagine how it could potentially be used in the Pharma world… sales reps, account managers, medical science liaison officers and other field (or office) based people could use it to find information about the surrounding area for every doctor's office or hospital they visit.

Perhaps they need to find other physicians or outpatient clinics, profiles and important customer information about their target list, maybe they need a cafe with wifi to download reports or key data such as sales or clinical trial information while in between appointments (or even access that through the browser), or they have someone with them and need somewhere for lunch etc etc. Imagine you could use an augmented reality browser on your smart phone to find all this information and more?

The opportunities with this sort of integrated app/browser are endless, especially if customised for each company. You're almost limited only by your own imagination with these sort of useful web2.0 tools coming out to help improve the speed of available information and work efficiency.

The downside? It's only available for Android phones on July 1st, but hopefully they will add Blackberry and iPhone functionality soon.

The world is changing fast. Who can possibly keep up with it?

7 Comments

Pharma Strategy Blog

Commentary on Pharma & Biotech Oncology / Hematology New Product Development

Posts tagged ‘pharmaceutical biotechnology marketing strategy consulting’

Where do patients and consumers go for online medical information?

Happy July 4th weekend!