‘Tis that time again when the calendar is down to just one page. A lot of us who talk and write for a living use this season of giving for one of two purposes—we either look back or we look ahead. Looking back is too easy; even I can tell you that the Yankees did not win the World Series. A really neat trick is telling you who will win the 2012 fall classic. So, ...
Unless you have been vacationing on a remote island recently, you may have heard that Steve Jobs passed away. I did not know the man personally, but I can say with certainty that he impacted my life. As a college freshman in 1985, I can remember the exact moment when the library at the University of Rochester got a whole bunch of Macintosh computers. Looking back on those machines, they did not do ...
The word “strategy” is one of the more overused terms in pharma today. The only thing more worn-out was the hype that surrounded Kim Kardashian’s wedding. (I guess my invitation got lost in the mail.) How many times, in your dealings with agencies, have you thought that they were not thinking strategically? I think all advertising/marketing agencies have been there at least a few times, and no one wants to be labeled in that way. ...
Like many before me, I came to agency life from academia. Needless to say, I have found these worlds to be very different, but one area where I am experiencing considerable déjà vu is how both become entranced by technology’s siren song. In the closing years of the 20th Century (ok, it was 1992), the scientific world was exploding with work performed with new molecular biology techniques. These were the days when new methods such as ...
When people say the world is getting smaller, they cannot exclude a changing pharmaceutical industry in that discussion. Years ago, if a company wanted to be a player in the drug industry, it went blockbuster or it went home. Diabetes, hypertension, depression, and other large therapeutic areas enjoyed an R&D boom during the 1990s and early 2000s. Surprisingly, there were plenty of paying patients for everyone to wet their beaks in the bath. However, in ...
Pharmaceutical companies, biotech firms, and medical communications agencies have relied on peer-to-peer programs to educate healthcare professionals on what they can do to better serve their patients. Unfortunately, the process we have become so comfortable with is beginning to show its age, and it is time for a change. As I wrote in my last post , it is time to boost the credibility of physicians who speak on behalf of the industry by ...
It has been said numerous times that nature abhors a vacuum, or at the very least, stagnant air. Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that we are approaching the shelf life of key opinion leaders (KOLs) in their present incarnation. When I started in this business, KOLs were our faculty, those go-to guys and gals who spoke on our behalf at congresses, dinner meetings, and other events where healthcare professionals gathered to hear ...
The FDA has decided to begin the process of removing the metastatic breast cancer (mBC) indication for Avastin (bevacizumab). Roche stands to lose $1 billion in revenue, while women have one less option to manage their disease. Two questions need to be answered: (1) was this the correct decision given the evidence and (2) what will be the ripple effect(s) of this decision? What happened to elicit this withdrawal? Avastin was approved in 2008 to treat ...
It is an increasingly rare day when patients, their physicians, and the pharmaceutical industry all agree on something. In this case, the something is the treatment of chronic pain, and they all agree that it is grossly undermanaged. Why is pain so poorly managed in the United States? It's not because the healthcare community has no access to potent analgesic medications. Actually, it is just the opposite. US physicians have a number of effective opioid ...
I watched the Indianapolis 500 this Memorial Day weekend and noticed something interesting. The fastest car completed 4 qualifying laps around the 2.5-mile oval with an average speed of 227 mph. However, the average speed of the winning car was a meager 162 mph. That is a big difference when you consider the conditions were, to the passive observer, similar. But a closer look reveals the underlying realities. During qualifying, there is only one car ...
