What Are Patients and Caregivers Talking About? Lung Cancer Biomarkers

What Are Patients and Caregivers Talking About? Lung Cancer Biomarkers By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Since the FDA approved the first targeted treatment for NSCLC in 2003, treatment decisions for NSCLC are increasingly made based on individual genomics.1,2  There are now 20 distinct biomarkers that serve as identification points differentiating cancer cells from healthy cells and distinguishing one expression of cancer from another. Science has progressed from identifying tumor cells on a slide to genetic and biochemical identification of NSCLC’s driving agents. Pharma companies are developing and improving increasingly targeted treatments.3 The science is also revealing just [...]

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Sep 2021By |0 Comments

Engaging with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients and Caregivers

Engaging with Non-Small Cell Lung Cancer and Small Cell Lung Cancer Patients and Caregivers By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH The word “Earth” doesn’t reflect the complexity and diversity of the planet. Similarly, the term “lung cancer” only identifies the location of the cancer. There are two general categories, non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) and small cell lung cancer (SCLC), differentiated by cell size, characteristics, treatments and prognosis. Genetic research continues to differentiate lung cancers at a molecular level, revealing subtypes within those categories, creating opportunities for increasingly targeted therapies. For example, since eight driver mutations have been [...]

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Jul 2021By |0 Comments

Searching for Answers to Migraines

Searching for Answers to Migraines By Kathleen Hoffman, PhD, MSPH Migraine headaches can be devastatingly debilitating: When my migraines get so bad, I stare at the wall in complete silence not letting my head touch anything. If my head touches something, it will send more pounding pain throughout my skull. Migraines are a widespread source of disability worldwide, with one systematic review of US government health studies finding 15.3% of Americans reporting a severe headache or migraine in the past three months.1 Three percent of all emergency room visits are for severe headache. Treating them remains difficult, [...]

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Jun 2021By |0 Comments

Customer Loyalty and Service Insights for the Pharmaceutical Industry

Customer Loyalty and Service Insights for the Pharmaceutical Industry By Dana Deighton “Only nine percent of U.S. consumers believe pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies put patients over profits.” This sentiment, found in the 2016 Harris Poll of Reputation Equity and Risk Across the Health Care Sector, has stayed fairly consistent in Harris polls until recently.1 In this year’s April and May series of surveys around the COVID-19 pandemic, Harris asked the question, “How has your view of [the Pharmaceutical Industry] changed since the start of the coronavirus pandemic?” In both the polls, 40% of respondents had a more [...]

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Aug 2020By |0 Comments

Can We Have Your Attention, Please?

Can We Have Your Attention, Please? By Heather Holder and Odin Soevik Internet users have a lot of experience in ignoring online advertising. The term “banner blindness” appeared around 1998 to describe online users’ acquired ability to ignore most banner ads as irrelevant to them. That’s 21 years of practice. Presumably, as new forms of advertising are developed, audiences have only gotten better at recognizing ads, and, if average click-through rates are a measurement, overlooking them. The Role of Personal Relevance Human brains are designed to perform “selective filtering,” attending to what is immediately relevant and [...]

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Sep 2019By |0 Comments

Join the Party…Sponsored Content / Native Advertising!

Join the Party...Sponsored Content / Native Advertising! By Odin Soevik There are two ways to be invited to a party where someone is selling something. Either your host tells you, up front, that it’s a party where part of the event is sales-related, and hopes you’re interested. Or, there’s the kind where you thought you were being invited over for dinner but you find out, too late, that your host is selling you life insurance. When the latter happens, you may not know how you feel about your friend. It’s the same with native advertising. Sponsored [...]

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Aug 2019By |0 Comments

Buzzword Bingo and Sponsored Content/Native Advertising

Buzzword Bingo and Sponsored Content / Native Advertising By Odin Soevik “Buzzword bingo” is a game in which everyone in a meeting gets a one-page grid of today’s business buzzwords. Each time a person in the meeting says one of the words, you mark the box with that word in it. The first person to mark off a full line of buzzwords, wins. If you work in pharmaceutical marketing, your bingo card definitely has some form of the word “storytelling” on it, along with a set including authenticity, relationship, brand equity, eWOM, influencers, and the old [...]

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Aug 2019By |0 Comments

Is There Any Way Left To Reach Patients?

Is There Any Way Left To Reach Patients? By Hillary Kuhl As patients rely less on physicians as their ultimate information resource, their treatment decision-making has increased in complexity. Inspire’s most recent Annual Survey found almost a quarter of patients making treatment decisions alone, nearly 70 percent making treatment decisions in collaboration with their physicians and only nine percent leaving the decision to their doctor. Patient involvement in their care has dramatically increased: patients talk about treatment options at least every other doctor visit and almost half said they initiate discussions about new treatment options.1 While [...]

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Aug 2019By |0 Comments

Looking for Guidance? FDA and PFDD at “Patients as Partners” 2019

Looking for Guidance? FDA and PFDD at "Patients as Partners" 2019 By Hannah Eccard Pujita Vaidya, Senior Advisor, Patient Focused Drug Development (PFDD) program at the Center for Drug Development and Research (CDER) at the FDA, told an audience at the Patients as Partners Conference last week that patients are the experts on their conditions and on day-to-day life with their disease. A patient outcome—where improvement with treatment is meaningful in daily life—can only be understood in a patient’s own words. Vaidya noted that, “patients ‘chief complaints’ may not be factored explicitly into drug development plans.” 1 [...]

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Mar 2019By |0 Comments