Precision Marketing for Precision Medicine: A New Era (Part 1)

🎙️ Welcome to another episode of the OUTCOMES podcast, where we break down the most effective digital-first marketing strategies for healthcare and biopharma sectors. Today, we are thrilled to have David Hubbell, Director of Strategy at emagine & emagineHealth, join host and Founding Partner, Bill Gadless.

📌 In This Episode:
We delve into the transformative role of marketing in the age of personalized medicine and cell & gene therapies. As the healthcare landscape rapidly evolves, so must our approach to marketing strategies that effectively target the right audiences and drive meaningful outcomes.

🔑 Key Topics:

- The advent of personalized medicine in biotech and pharma
- The marketing challenges and opportunities presented by cell & gene therapies
- Marketing strategies for the digital age
- The future of biopharma marketing

🎯 Who Should Watch?

Biopharma Executives
Marketing Professionals in Healthcare & Biotech
Medical Researchers focused on Personalized Medicine
Entrepreneurs in the Biotech and Pharma sectors

Website: 
https://www.emaginehealth.com/

LinkedIn: 
https://www.linkedin.com/company/emagineusa/

Thank you for listening to OUTCOMES. Please find more healthcare and biopharma marketing thought leadership in the Insights section of our website and follow us on LinkedIn!

Transcript

0:00

Welcome to Outcomes, the healthcare and biopharma marketing podcast, where marketing leaders discuss the most effective strategies for the health sectors coming from a digital first AI powered perspective. Today, I am happy to have here with me, David Hubbell. David is Imagine and Imagine Health's director of strategy. He's been with us. For quite a while now. He, um, in a previous life, David worked, uh, worked in the tech industry at Gartner, um, did a lot of marketing there. And then, um, going back probably close to 15 years ago, uh, we crossed paths working for a mutual client over in tech. And as my agency imagined, um, Was gradually migrating into biotech and those types of things. Um, David and I were collaborating and he ended up joining Imagine and has since that time worked with dozens and dozens of our various clients in the biopharma and healthcare sectors. Um, and he does. Everything from audience profiling to journey mapping to messaging and positioning and all sorts of brand strategy for these clients. And today we're going to talk about a very complex topic. I don't know how much he and I will get into the complexities of it, as neither of us are scientists or physicians. We certainly understand how complex the topic of personalized medicine personalized health care, precision therapies, um, there's a whole bunch of names for this stuff, um, and specifically cell and gene therapy, um, and, and what all of those things mean from a marketing strategy perspective. This is, this is an era that is really, I think, David, we'd agree a watershed period for healthcare. Um, nothing, nothing has really, other than AI, which is kind of happening simultaneously. And we all know that's going to change things, uh, enormously, but this whole era of personalized medicine and cell and gene is, is just like, unlike anything that's, that's happened, at least in the recent past, I mean, we're really moving from a period of. Or a history of mostly treating symptoms that patients have to addressing the root causes of diseases. And that just changes everything. And obviously there's a lot of education, there's a lot of advocacy, there's a lot of different groups that need to understand what all this means. And we, as the marketers and communicators, are a big part of that, along with our clients. I'd like to just kind of start by, you know, David, we're going to dive into stuff like what this means to specific audiences and all that. But, you know, just get your overview of this, of this trend and this era that we're living in. Yeah. So, I mean, for so long. We've been treating symptoms, um, and, and we've been doing a good job of it, but we're now at a point where we can see things we couldn't see before. We can understand things that we didn't understand before, and we've really zeroed in on the biology. of the human versus the chemistry of the human. And we're able to really now understand the root causes of disease, the triggers, and be able to create therapies that will actually go in and eradicate them. So instead of treating them, We're eradicating them. And, and it's, it's huge. Um, but with it, I mean, it comes a fundamental shift. Um, it's no longer prescribing medication. It's really understanding the underlying symptoms. And, you know, we'll talk about it, but Think about the HCP explaining this to a patient. It's not take this prescription, and I'm not trying to oversimplify the HCPs, but it is much more involved. And the journeys that the patients will go on are much more involved. Um, it could be seven different steps to a journey over a one year period and then monitored thereafter. So, A lot of good coming out of this. There's no doubt about it. Um, we're really at this, this fundamental transition. And as you said before, it's really going to be about the marketing. You know, you're gonna have to think about different things and we're already exposed to this with some of our clients. So, um, I'm excited about it. I mean, I, I really think it's, it's tremendous opportunity. Yeah, and, and with regard to our clients, you know, without giving specific names, we really are seeing the entire, um, kind of cell and gene continuum because we've got, we've got clients that are earlier stage biotechs developing some of this stuff. We've got the CROs who are conducting the clinical trials on these types of therapies. We've got CDMO clients who are handling the very complex manufacturing, um, of this. And then we have healthcare clients who are actually, Delivering these therapies. And we even worked with a tech company who managed the entire supply chain, um, for cell and gene. So we, you know, it's, it's kind of cool for that. We've, we've kind of seen the entire ecosystem here. Um, and yeah, I think as I look at it all as, as a marketer and. You know, not, I'm sure many in the healthcare industry would, would be offended by, by me using the term one size fits all, but in a way, like you said, when, when prescribing a pill or giving a shot in a way that is one size fits all medicine, whereas this is the shift toward it being very specific and targeted to that particular patient. Their genetics and, and their cells and it, and it changes everything. And I think from a marketing standpoint, this means no one size fits all marketing either. And we'll, I don't know, I don't think we'll get too deep into things like marketing, personalization and AI and things like that today, but that's where marketing is going as well. So the two things are kind of happening at the same time. Let's, let's start with patients, David. And I think that, you know, that's, it's, that's going to be the biggest hurdle, I think, for personalized medicine, cell and gene in terms of marketing. HCPs are not, we'll get to HCPs, physicians. Um, they're going to be a little bit ahead of understanding the science. Uh, but there's a lot of education. That's going to have to happen on the patient side, so. Um, let's, let me turn it over to you again and let's just talk about your thoughts on reaching patients with all this. Yeah. And before we go there, I mean, you know, we talk about this personalized medicine, but it really pours out into a couple of different buckets. Um, so there's complexity right from the top. It's no longer a medicine that you take or a surgery that you go through. It really has five different categories and I'll go real fast here, but you know, The first is prevention and early detection. And, you know, we go to our doctor once a year, maybe, and they do a blood test and they can tell you a thousand things these days. It's really amazing, right? But the fact is, sometimes it's too late. And so the future is going to be that we may be constantly monitoring ourselves, especially if we know we have a family condition or something like that. Um, you know, the second one is really customized treatments. You know, basically it's customized drugs or therapies designed for just. One person, you know, one person or a few people based on their genetic makeup, the drug is tweaked in a certain way and it's highly effective for them. Right. The third is curative therapies, right? That cure the underlying disease. I talked about this a second ago. That to me is the biggest promise. I mean, it's absolutely amazing to think that we could. Go through a course of treatment may include our own cells involved with it, and you know, we won't get into the science, but you know that that to me is fantastic. 4th 1, you know, I'd like to tell you, I know more about it, but it's digital therapeutics and it's it's really more behavior modification and eventually trying to reduce the need for medicine just based on behavior modification. And then the 5th is precision intervention, and these are what we medical treatments delivered with robotics. And so we have all these things. I think we most commonly run into the people who are doing the monitoring. We've done that. Um, we did that with, um, uh, uh, uh, the pregnancy, um, miscarriages and so forth. Yeah. And, um, and then, you know, we've done some of these customized treatments and curative therapies, not yet. But we're starting to get involved in it. Um, so I think, you know, that just means a huge, as you just said, a changing landscape for marketers. And they're really going to have to have new approaches to this. Um, and, and having worked with a couple already, we're starting to see what that means. Um, but he wanted to talk about the patients and so forth and. I think there's three audiences we're going to talk about, you know, HCPs, KOLs and patients. And, and let's start with the patients. Um, you know, I, I think that the key point is a lot of changes here and, you know, you have to market to, in some cases, one individual, you know, and you have to start thinking about this. So to me, it's the intersection between. The patient's journey and the care that's delivered and thinking that whole thing through. So like I said, some of these are seven steps over a year and there are going to be different HCPs that come in. So from the audience of the patients, I really think it's important that they start to understand Just how far, you know, these treatments will go and the steps and so forth. And that's going to be up to the HCP. So I think we have two things with patients. One is a patient is suddenly diagnosed with a condition. The other is that someone knows they have a family history or. How many people are fighting different diseases right now or in conditions and waiting for these drugs, right? So those are two totally different patient audiences. Um, and, and I think, you know, without a doubt, they're all going to need to be educated. Um, and I think that one of the most important things is to try to make the narrative simple. Um, the use of analogies. So you talk about detection. And as I was researching, you know, the market, you know, getting ready for this, I came across an analogy that somebody had come up with is in diagnostics, you know, like I said, we go to the doctor once a year or something, and they tell us what if we were continuously monitoring. And so the, the analogy was, and I never knew this. When you take a commercial flight, there's hundreds of sensors in the jet engines and those jet engines are being monitored at GE and Rolls Royce by a team of people. Every plane that's in flight is being monitored and in a lot of cases they see things that are going wrong and they can adjust it without even telling the pilots. So imagine that kind of, maybe it's too much for patients when you think about it. But, um, you know, that's one of the things that we're going to see, but more than anything, um, you know, the analogies are going to help, but they need to understand the journey that they're going to go on. Um, and if it's a one course therapy, what are the, what are the, you know, symptoms that they might have afterwards? It's going to be different. And again, I believe that we won't depart from the relationship we have with our health care providers. That will, that will stay. And as patients, we expect them to educate us, to talk to us, you know, tell us what's going to happen. And so I think the real heavy lifting is in educating the HCPs and we'll talk about KOLs coming into it. Yeah. And I think going back to the genetic testing, that's evolving pretty rapidly too. I think the most common example that most of us are aware of is with, with regard to breast cancer and the BRCA gene, because that's not really a new thing. That's something we've all been aware of for a long time. But what's, what's happening is this is becoming much more of a mainstream thing and not just that particular genetic test for that one particular cancer. This is going to become a normal part of a lot of people's lives with regard to a lot of different genetic tests and a lot of different potential diseases that they have, that they could get. Yep. Yep. Totally agree. And you know, and it gets back to kind of, this is personalized, right? So this brings in a whole new aspect that any marketing strategy is going to really have to carefully consider. Who you can engage through what means and how best to do it. So pharmaceutical companies can't just throw, and I'm not trying to minimize it, but you can't do television ads during the super bowl. I mean, it's not going to work. Right. Um, and, and so personal means confidentiality, respect and all that goes with it. And I think that, you know. Healthcare providers and the pharmaceutical companies, the technology companies are all going to have to figure out how do I get to that audience of one or a few, right? You know, one option there, and there have been several drug companies that have had great success with this, if it's, you know, kind of a rare disease, is patient communities and patient advocacy groups and teaming up with them. So you're doing two things. You're really getting their point of view. Um, you really understanding the struggles they go through and and in another vein, you are starting to connect with them and educate them as to the potential. Um, and I think with those situations, it's best to get in early, make the relationship and make them part of your discovery journey. And, and so that changes the whole thing that you've got a patient site, you know, it may have all kinds of different things that are welcoming people to engage and follow along at home because they're hoping for a miracle. Yeah, I think, I think the advocacy groups have to be a big part of this for the pharmaceutical company. Um, for one, I mean, just the word itself, advocacy, they truly are the patient advocates. They're going to help convey. The meaning of this stuff to patients a lot better than scientists are going to be in many cases, but they also, you know, they mobilize to influence government policy on these types of things as well. They, they're instrumental in approvals happening. They're, they're, I mean, some of this. Cell and gene therapy is going to be very costly for patients as well. And the advocacy groups play a role even in working with payers, um, and, and value based care. So I do, I, I see a significant role here for advocacy groups.