ePharma, the "Ron Paul" of Pharma Marketing - We Are the 1%

ePharma, the "Ron Paul" of Pharma Marketing - We Are the 1%

At yesterday's ePharma Summit conference session on "Jumpstarting Digital Capabilities in Pharma: Learning from Other Industries," the presenter, Pete Mehr, Chief Healthcare Strategy Officer at Merkle, Inc., asked the audience "If you agree with the general thrust of this conference, how come it hasn't happened?"

By "general thrust" he meant that pharma must get more involved in eMarketing and catch up with the rest of the world. "The tools are there. So how come the change is so hard?"

Unfortunately for Mehr, he was standing right in front of me when he asked that question, so I just had to respond.

"We are the one percent," I said.

Of course, that was meant partly as a joke and I knew it would not lead the discussion where Mehr wanted it to go. So, I did not get a chance to explain what I meant.

What did I mean? It relates to what I often think while attending these conferences; namely, we are preaching to the choir and that choir is a small minority within the pharma marketing biosphere. But in the bizarro world of pharma marketing, that choir is not the "richest" as it is in the real world, but the poorest.

eMarketing is only a small percentage of the pharma marketing spend and it always has been and it may always be. It's the "Ron Paul" of candidates seeking marketing dollars. It's nice for Republicans to have Ron Paul and his creative ideas, but the big wigs would not like to see him rise beyond single digits. Same with pharma marketing's "Ron Paul" -- eMarketing.

Although there was one pharma marketing big wig at the conference -- Charlotte McKines, Global VP, Marketing Communications and Channel Strategies, Merck & Co. -- she was the exception that proved the rule.

I don't know if the ePharma Summit audience understood what I was getting at, so I decided to write this post. Tell me what you think.

Bayer's CEO Accuses Patients of Being Ungrateful B*stards! We Cured Cancer, Dammit!

Bayer's CEO Accuses Patients of Being Ungrateful B*stards! We Cured Cancer, Dammit!

That's my takeaway from this comment by Marijn Dekkers, "outspoken" head of Bayer Pharmaceuticals, in which he not only disses patients but claims to have cured cancer!

"If you have cancer, you get a pharmaceutical product, and your cancer goes away. You're quick to call the doctor and [say] the staff at the hospital was great. But the pill that did it gets forgotten. We struggle with getting society to put value on what we do, and it becomes particularly important as we get under more pressure to develop the next pill" (read the WSJ article here).

This guy must be living on another planet. That planet, of course, is Planet Pharma where the drug industry rules, all cancer has been cured by the industry and where patients bow when they see a pharma CEO ride by in his open-air limo!

I've brought up the subject of pharma taking most of the credit for improving cancer survival rates when in fact most of the credit in those gross numbers is due to the fact that many people have simply quit smoking. Dekkers' remark, however, is the first time I've seen the drug industry take credit for curing cancers. Perhaps he was making unsubstantiated claims about regorafenib, a colon cancer drug Bayer is developing. It's hardly a cure. "The median overall survival of patients on experimental regorafenib was 6.4 months. That compares to five months for patients who were given a placebo" (see "Bayer, Onyx cancer drug shows modest improvement in survival").

On Quora, I posted the question: "How close are the pharmaceutical companies to "curing" cancer?" (see here) and got some interesting feedback. Dan Munro (@danmunro), Founder / CEO - iPatient, had this to say:

"While curing a given cancer is clearly a worthwhile goal - it is often not the primary focus - and early detection is still the leading indicator of successfully treating all cancers. Some cancers are simply pushed so far into remission that you're more likely to die of a different cancer or old age in your sleep. It's not a technical cure - but it's a practical one.

"The sad reality is this: The death rate for cancer (adjusted for the size and age of the population) has dropped only 5% from 1950 to 2005 (see here).  

"One weapon that will aid in their research for effective treatments was announced at CES earlier this month. Life Technologies Ion Proton Genetic Sequencer."

So, (1) the reality is that the death rate for cancer hasn't improved very much in the past 50 years, and (2) pharma's little "pills" haven't contributed much to that statistic. Shame on Bayer for taking credit where none is due!

Pfizer's Contraceptive Recall: A Statistical Needle in a Haystack!

Pfizer's Contraceptive Recall: A Statistical Needle in a Haystack!

All day yesterday, the news swirled through social media about Pfizer's voluntary nationwide recall of contraceptive tablets due to the possibility of "inexact tablet counts or out of sequence tablets." As a result of this packaging error, the daily regimen for these oral contraceptives may be incorrect and could leave women without adequate contraception, and at risk for unintended pregnancy. That's a serious issue for any woman affected and it obviously warrants a recall.

Although Pfizer issued a timely press release dated 31 January 2012 -- which was picked up by the news media -- it did not post a tweet notice via @pfizer_news until about 5 PM yesterday. That tweet announced "Chief Medical Officer Freda Lewis-Hall Addresses Company's Voluntary Recall of Contraceptive Products" and linked to a YouTube video (embedded in this post below). A good use of YouTube -- although the video has only been viewed 444 times so far. But waiting for the video to be produced before sending out a notice of the recall via Twitter was not a good idea considering that nearly 24,000 people follow @pfizer_news!

I'm just curious why Pfizer didn't send out a tweet as soon as it published its press release on 31 January? In one step, 24,000 people could have been directed to the press release. Anyway, here's the video:



Did you hear Dr. Freda Lewis-Hall tell us how many packages Pfizer thinks were faulty? "We believe there are approximately thirty packs of birth control pills that may have received an inexact count or inactive tablets," she said. THIRTY! To retrieve these 30 packages, Pfizer recall 14 lots or approximately 1 million packages! I'm not a mathematician, but the odds that any of these 30 packages will be in the actual packages recalled must be very slim. After all, you can say you are recalling 1 million packages, but how many will actually end up back in Pfizer's warehouses? I imagine a voluntary recall is very INEFFICIENT.

30 out of 1,000,000 is 0.0003%. Even if a voluntary recall sweeps in 99.99% of the 1 million packages, that leaves 0.01% still out there. That's 33 times the number of faulty packs.

Mining FDA's AER Database: Heaven for Hypochondriacs, Hell for Pharma

Mining FDA's AER Database: Heaven for Hypochondriacs, Hell for Pharma

A story in yesterday's WSJ Health featured AdverseEvents Inc., a start-up company that has streamlined the FDA's "often impenetrable" adverse drug event database and made it easy to search the adverse-event reports (AERs) for more than 4,500 drugs, free and online (see here).

I interviewed Brian M. Overstreet, founder and president of Adverse Events, last September on my Pharma Marketing Talk show. You can use the widget below to listen to that interview>



The pharmaceutical industry is a bit nervous about consumers getting easy access to FDA's "hidden" treasure trove of AERs:

Kate Connors, a spokeswoman for the Pharmaceutical Research & Manufacturers of America, which represents most drug makers, said the group isn't familiar with AdverseEvents and believes the FDA is the most appropriate source of information. "We think it's important for this information to be framed within context and to be properly evaluated," she says.

But the FDA passes the buck as far as being the authoritative source for AE info. As reported in the WSJ, FDA's site warns that its AER files "cannot be used to calculate the incidence of an adverse-event in the U.S. population." For consumers who want more information on drug side effects, "the best source is to read the product label and talk to your doctor or pharmacist," says Gerald Dal Pan, director of surveillance and epidemiology in the FDA's Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

"Read the product label"! That's a joke, right? FDA hasn't made much progress simplifying drug labels either because of industry resistance or being forced to do endless studies on the issue (see, for example, "FDA Plans to Test New Standard for Easy to Understand Rx Labels").

Meanwhile, how risky are Rx drugs? I invite you to take "Harry's Drug Risk Parlor Game" and rate the overall risk of Rx drugs (you will be able to see the results to date afterward).

[Hat Tip to @Pernajl for the "heaven for Hypochondriacs" part of this blog post title.]