2025 Funday Friday #5: Where No Life Science Marketer has Gone (Probably) Before
tl;dr-
Patient centricity is the future of biopharma commercialization. Don't believe me? Maybe you'll believe BCG!
Snark aside, I truly believe this. There is real opportunity in biopharmaceutical companies looking to optimize the experience all patients have with their product. This goes beyond just filling prescriptions and patient support; it encompasses every stage of the patient journey, from the initial question about potential symptoms to seeking care and interacting with healthcare providers and payers. Companies in other industries have long recognized that every moment of interaction with a potential customer is a chance to educate and spark meaningful interest; accordingly, I'm surprised at the seeming lack of zeal among biopharma companies to adopt advanced technologies that could enhance their engagement with patients along the entire journey.
More and more however, my hypothesis is less a lack of zeal and more a lack of knowledge. Unlike other industries, healthcare does not have an easy way for companies to assemble the data required for a truly integrated patient journey. For one, healthcare data is not easily aggregated, with data generating companies often looking for any reason to monetize their data assets and not collaborate. For two, unlike Netflix or search histories, health information presents a much more significant risk to patient well-being - which means access, rightfully, needs to be thoughtfully controlled. For three, even if you had all of this data in one place, how would you even assemble it all to make something useful?
The best way to understand someone is to well, be them. Barring soul-body transfers, the next best way is to observe them - and there is no shortage of market research projects in biopharma today. However, current market research problems face some inherent methodological flaws. Once is that all market research requires some amount of intervention - putting a survey in front of you, or asking you questions - which introduces artificiality that isn't there in the real world. Another is scale; market research, particularly qualitative research, is difficult to scale beyond a certain number of people. Without scale, the question of sampling bias becomes ever more critical to address and, at the end of the day, no company can ever get it 100% right all the time.
It's why I really love the concept of digital twins as a way for biopharmaceutical companies to better understand their patients. Creating a digital patient and placing them in simulated environments allows us to create solutions to both of the challenges above; simulations are inherently non-interventional outside of the initial design, and as these are 'virtual' entities, there is no 'real' or 'hard' scaling challenge like you would with market research. By creating these virtual entities and essentially running them through endless variations of their patient journey - the type of information they receive, the doctor they visit, the care they get, and of course, the journey from script to fill - biopharma companies can truly expand their ability to observe their core stakeholder and identify key interaction points in a way that more traditional research methodologies may never really uncover.
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Of course, creating a digital twin in this way has its own challenges. Outside of the design questions involved, there is the data question - and the lack of true data interoperability in healthcare and the privacy question to ensure patients are protected. Patient privacy, however, at least has a solution through patient data deidentification - common now in many companies - and through use of synthetic data - which is less common. This just leaves data interoperability, which - as I allude to above - is also solvable if you have enough resources. I'm sure if you threw enough money at it, someone will be willing to open their data vaults to you.
If this all sounds fancy and far-out, let me bring you back to earth; marketing and commercial teams have been doing 'digital twins' since the very beginning! At its very essence, the digital twin is simply an abstraction of data that describes a patient and allows you some degree to answer 'what if' questions. This is in reality no different than a patient segment or archetype from market research, nor is it different from the nascent 'here's what our patients are like' understanding you hear brand leads say all the time. In truth, biopharma has been creating 'proto' digital twins from qualitative research and surveys for decades, all to better understand patient needs and how best to serve them.
There's no real need to change that part - the discovery of new patient insights. What can change is how we do it. With the next generation of tools becoming more accessible and sophisticated by the day, the only thing limiting where enterprising commercial life science professionals and brand leads may voyage is their own imagination, and their own strength of will to explore strange new worlds where few have yet to go.
New frontiers into deep space are always exciting, aren't they?
Talk soon.
-WY
Gene Therapy Drug Developer | Senior Scientist | Champion for Rare Disease Solutions ????
1 个月Fully agree! Probably digital twins for marketing can generate more immediate ROI than in R&D but the data is just not there. I don't even have all my medical history from the different PCPs I visited together at one place. Thus I believe This will be much easier for OTC drugs as you won't have to deal with all the gaps in data collection.