Posts tagged ‘Pharma Social Media’
Alpharadin may change standard of care for prostate cancer patients with bone mets
September 29th, 2011
Daedalus
We recently attended the 2011 European Multidisciplinary Cancer Congress in Stockholm. Paradigm shifting data in breast cancer and advanced prostate cancer were presented at what turned out to be an excellent meeting in a charming, if expensive, city.
Sally Church (@MaverickNY) live tweeted several sessions from the meeting and was name the “Top Twitter Influencer” for the #EMCC2011 hashtag. You can catch up with the tweets fron ECCO ESMO ESTRO 2011 on Pharma Strategy Blog.
Pieter Droppert (@3NT) has written several posts on biotech strategy blog about the exciting data for radium-223 (Alpharadin) in advanced prostate cancer that was presented in Stockholm.
He also produced a video of the media briefing by Dr Chris Parker from the Royal Marsden Hospital where the ALSYMPCA phase 3 trial results were reviewed. It is well worth watching!
Please contact us if you would like to learn more about the fast moving Prostate Cancer market and how pharma marketing strategy may be impacted by the new products in development such as radium-223 (Alpharadin), that is on fast track for FDA approval in 2012.
One of the trends we continue to see is the increased use of video for physician education, clinical trial recruitment and providing of healthcare information. Video lends itself well to a marketing strategy, not only does it engage on a personal level but facilitates the explanation of complex information.
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog highlights the social media strategy and video by Dr Anas Younes (@DrAnasYounes) from MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX.
As Sally notes, “slowly but surely, we are seeing more use of social media in one area where I really think it can help a lot – clinical trials.”
Dr Younes’ video explains the opportunity to participate in clinical trials with new agents to treat Peripheral T-Cell Lymphoma (PTCL), a rare blood disease.
It is a short video well worth watching and forwarding on to others.
On Pharma Strategy Blog today, Sally Church (@MaverickNY) has shared a video from TEDxOverlake (@TEDxOverlake) by Jack West MD (@JackWestMD) that is well worth watching.
Dr West heads up the non-profit Global Resource for Advancing Cancer Education (GRACE) on which Sally is a board member. He is also a regional expert in lung-cancer based in Seattle.
Dr West talks about his experiences with a patient who was intimately involved in his own patient care and why having empowered and knowledgable patients should be embraced by the medical community. It’s a compelling story entitled “learning as if your life depended on it,” and highlights how leveraging the internet for knowledge, literally can save your life.
Self-educated patients are the future of cancer care. This video is well worth watching, and reminds us why non-profit organizations such as Dr West’s GRACE should be supported.
Pieter Droppert has prepared a short (2 minute) video review of BIO 2011, in which he notes that one of the major themes of the meeting was facilitating partnering, licensing & business development discussions between pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Astra Zeneca tweeted that they had 500 partnering discussions planned, a number that is perhaps not so surprising in light of their pipeline and patent cliff over the next few years.
Another major focus of BIO was the marketing of biotechnology regions that takes place in the exhibit hall and at satellite events. Pieter has written in more detail on Biotech Strategy Blog about the session on innovation he attended, networking opportunities and the face of biotech social media.
His not too serious BIO 2011 video, that you can watch below, captures what he thought of the meeting as a first-time attendee.
We wish our Canadian clients a Happy Canada Day today and our United States clients an enjoyable Independence Day weekend. Icarus Consultants will be open for business again on Tuesday, July 5th.
I tweet therefore I am! Sally Church who has a lot of experience in pharma social media, was recently featured in the May 31st bulletin of the National Cancer Institute (NCI).
In an excellent article by Edward Winstead, entitled “Scientific Meetings through the Lens of Twitter”, Sally is quoted on how Twitter has been used to share information at the recent 2011 annual meetings of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) and American Urological Association (AUA).
With multiple scientific sessions taking place in parallel at conferences, live-tweets from participants do allow you to follow what is happening elsewhere, and indeed may stimulate you to change session (to a more interesting one).
If you can’t be present at a meeting, following the conference on twitter, gives you insight into some of the key messages. However, there’s only so much that can be said in 140 characters, so tweets are not likely to replace more in-depth blog posts. Also, like listening in on a conversation, what is tweeted cannot necessarily be relied upon.
Sally will be live-tweeting from the forthcoming 2011 annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology. She will also be aggregating, on Pharma Strategy Blog, the tweets of others who are using the hashtag #ASCO11. ”Check it out!” as Sally would say.
The 2011 annual meeting of the American Urological Association (AUA) ended in Washington DC today.
Some of the highlights of the meeting were written about on Pharma Strategy Blog and Biotech Strategy Blog, these include:
PIVOT (Prostate Cancer Intervention versus Observation Study)
The data from this study was presented in Tuesday’s plenary session by Dr Tim Wilt, a Professor at the University of Minnesota, and was to many attendees, the highlight of the meeting.
The trial results showed for the first time that radical prostatectomy (RP) is no better than watchful waiting in men with early stage prostate cancer using evidence based medicine.
This groundbreaking research is likely to have a major impact on urology practice in the United States.
Pieter Droppert wrote about the PIVOT results on Biotech Strategy Blog. Scott Hensley on NPR’s Health Blog, “Shots” references Pieter’s post, and has an interview with Dr Wilt that is also well worth reading.
Also presented at AUA in Tuesday’s plenary session were the results from:
Denosumab (Xgeva®) 147 phase III trial
This study looked at castrate resistant prostate cancer patients at high risk of development of bone metastasis.
Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog discusses the results presented by Dr Matthew Smith at AUA. Denosumab was shown to increase bone metastasis-free survival and delayed time to first bone metastasis, but did not increase overall survival (OS).
Both Sally Church and Pieter Droppert also wrote additional blog posts from the meeting. On Biotech Strategy Blog, Pieter wrote about data that showed:
He also wrote about:
New Prostate Cancer products in development beyond the androgen axis
Some of the new products mentioned in Pieter’s post include alpharadin, XL-184 (cabozantinib), Prostvac-VF, BPX-101 and ipilimumab. You can read more on Biotech Strategy Blog.
Meanwhile on Pharma Strategy Blog, Sally Church continued one of her themes of how social media is impacting medical conferences by reviewing:
How AUA have embraced Social Media in 2011
Sally also recorded a video blog post (vlog) from AUA that highlighted some of the exciting developments in basic biology and how this may lead to new Prostate Cancer treatments in the future. Click here to watch this.
If you were unable to attend the meeting, Sally aggregated the #AUA2011 tweets.
Selecting what to write about on a blog is subjective, so the above posts are not intended to provide comprehensive meeting or conference coverage, only a few highlights of what was presented at the highly informative and educational AUA annual meeting.
If you are interested in a more comprehensive report on the Prostate Cancer Market and the emerging new products in development, please do not hesitate to contact us.
Icarus Consultants congratulates Sally Church (@MaverickNY) on being recognized as one of “The Nifty 50 Top Women of Twitter for 2011“.
Sally is well known within Pharma social media circles and has also appeared on CNBC to talk about FDA Social Media policy.
We applaud Sally for all her engagement in social media that reflects her passion and knowledge about the pharmaceutical industry and in particular oncology, hematology science, marketing and new product development.
If you have a forthcoming conference, Sally is available for speaking opportunities to share her insight about social media strategy and marketing in the pharma industry.
At the recent annual meeting of the American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) in Orlando, Sally Church on Pharma Strategy Blog, chose a poster by patient advocate, Leslie Hammersmith as “My AACR Poster of the Day.” A hard won accolade in a field of more than 5000 posters!
One of the attractions of this poster, (and you can read more about why Sally chose it on Pharma Strategy Blog) was its use of social media, and particular quick response (QR) codes.
QR codes are a matrix bar code that is now easily readable by smart phones, you can readily find apps for the iPhone. By scanning the QR code using the camera in the phone you are automatically directed to further information – whether it be a copy of the poster, a scientific paper or a website.
As Sally said in her blog post about Leslie’s poster, “The clever use of QR codes made me want it on all the science posters too.” A few other science researchers did have QR codes on their posters, and we see this as a social media trend that will expand.
We will be adding a QR code to our next print run of business cards, will you?