This is a write-up of an interview that took part between Tom Allen, Founder of The AI Journal and Badal Shah, Managing Director at Neolytica. Together they discuss the rate of change the biopharma industry is facing and how brands can leverage the power of health analytics to make more informed decisions while improving quicker, focused messaging throughout the organisation.
You can find out how Neolytica is transforming the biopharma industry with their pioneering adoption of AI and Data Science and what they can do for your operations by visiting the website: https://www.neolytica.ai/
Tom Allen Opening Statement: As per the March 2022 Press Release on Businesswire, Neolytica – a subsidiary of QPharma had an explosive 270% business growth making it one of the 12 among the
top 20 biopharma innovators. Congratulations!
Q: How did the idea of Neolytica take shape?
A: Thanks! Although QPharma (the parent company) has been in the biopharma industry for 30
years, serving compliance and commercial teams, with Neolytica.ai we wanted to create a unique
offering where we combine the industry experience with new technology offering of Artificial
Intelligence & Machine Learning to introduce a futuristic, cutting-edge solution that would help
Marketing, Commercial as well as Medical Affairs/Communication teams in a more cohesive way.
Currently, there are a lot of KOL Mapping solutions out there in the market. Despite this, there
remain three major gaps in the KOL Engagement industry. We found our motivation in resolving
these gaps, and thus the foundation of Neolytica was laid. The first one is the complete
syndication of databases. The industry followed a “One Size Fit All” approach. A syndicated
database followed a simple subscription-based model, whereby the vendors would offer
subscriptions to different biopharma companies with products in a similar therapeutic area. This
was causing biopharma companies to target the same Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs), as they
repeatedly were accessing the same list of experts provided by vendors. This eventually became
a redundant practice as biopharma companies were not getting access to the right KOLs, and
lacked customized insights in their medical messaging, which resulted in sub-optimal strategies
and incorrect market positioning.
The second gap was how medical and commercial teams are creating their strategies in silos,
which indirectly impacted drug launches, increasing the overall investment required, and making
the drug much more expensive. We wanted to use our 30 years of industry compliance expertise
to help both medical and commercial teams work collectively and create an integrated drug launch
strategy that was much more cost-effective and reduced the disease burden on the patients.
The third one was the gap in medical education i.e. within the biopharma companies. The practice
had been only communicating the benefits of a drug or the drug therapy to a few top KOLs. We
felt it is vitally important to communicate that message, not just to the KOLs, but also to the
community leaders and the local physicians who are in the field meeting and treating patients on
day-to-day basis.
So, to summarize, the idea of Neolytica was conceptualized to tackle these 3 shortcomings in the
system and to help pharmaceutical companies achieve the right kind of reach among the right
kind of KOLs that align the most with their drug product.
Q: Why do biopharma companies need Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) now more than ever, especially after the pandemic and when the dynamics of the biopharma market are changing?
A: In the Pre-pandemic era, biopharma companies were spending over $90 million on in-person
speaker programs for a particular brand. During the height of the Covid pandemic, KOLs could
not attend conferences or communicate with their peers, so they started using digital mediums
for communication with not only peer Health Care Professionals (HCPs) but even patient
advocacy groups that were following them closely. They realized that they could generate better
visibility and reach larger audiences with virtual speaker programs, at almost 1/100th the price.
This recently shifted focus on digital presence brought a huge impact on the way biopharma
companies selected and build their KOL mapping strategies. Neolytica too, quickly adapted to
this changing need and supported them with this digital revolution and helped biopharma
companies reach a much wider and more relevant audience.
Q: How do you measure customer success?
A: We measure customer success by how effectively biopharma companies communicate the
impact of their novel drug therapies to the maximum number of Health Care Professionals (HCPs)
in the universe. With Neolytica, we try to use different amalgamations of solutions to help them
achieve that goal so that ultimately the patients are the beneficiary of the therapies.
Q: How does your innovative platform help your customers answer their critical
misconceptions about KOL identification and mapping?
A: Well, I would say there are three major misconceptions in the industry. One is around the process
of identifying the same KOLs based on their publications, trials, conferences, and so on. This is
ineffective because biopharma companies are coming up with novel therapies, and these
therapies are completely innovative in targets and even mechanisms of action than ones being
used five years or ten years ago. So, to communicate these novel therapies we need rising stars
and new KOLs prominently active on client-specific key topics.
The second misconception is identifying KOLs who are highly active versus choosing KOLs with
a solid network in the medical community. Because, at the end of the day, every company wants
its messages to percolate to the community leaders and the local HCPs.
The third misconception is regarding measuring the impact of medical affairs. A lot has been
spoken about Scientific Share of Voice (SSoV) to measure the impact but it’s a very myopic way
of calculating just the quantity of activity by a KOL on a client’s product. Neolytica is the first
company to introduce “Sentiment Analysis” where we are peeling the onion to understand not just
the quantity but if the KOL/Medical community is Positive, Negative, or Neutral towards the client’s
products and competitors and the reason behind their sentiment. It not only takes the measuring
of impact to another level but also helps client revise their strategy and enhance their HCP
engagement.
Our mission at Neolytica is to educate biopharma companies about these misconceptions and
offer them a more customized, up-to-date, and technology-enabled solution.
Q: We would love to hear a key customer success story where Neolytica’s analytics
platform helped a biopharma company.
A: A key example is how we helped one of the top 5 biopharma companies: We worked with the
client and helped them launch a new drug, as they were completely new in their specialization.
Their efforts were limited by their team size, so we worked closely with their medical and
marketing departments to create a cohesive strategy that helped them identify experts highly
active on specific topics, and also the ones who would be most effective in communicating their
message to peer experts, community leaders, and local HCPs.
The KOLs we suggested were “rising stars”, which meant they were much more impactful for their
advisory board and speaker programs. With 40 KOLs on board and 290 community leaders, we
helped our client achieve greater than 40% penetration among the targeted HCP audience, which
was more than 10,000. Also, their marketing teams focused on using the KOLs and community
leaders that we identified, which resulted in product adoption of over 65%.
Q: How is Neolytica differentiating itself from its competitors that provide the same cutting-edge technology products and solutions to their customers by leveraging data science and
artificial intelligence?
A: We are not just an out-of-the-box solution. Our customized offering has helped us provide
significant value for our clients, as we are not providing a data dump, but rather are creating
awareness and solving very specific HCP engagement problems. For instance, a client intended
to understand how they could surge patient enrollment for their clinical trials at different locations
in the US, as well as in Europe. We helped them identify the nearby HCPs and helped them
engage with local HCPs. So, we have been successful in creating customized solutions
based on client-specific problems rather than just creating a vanilla platform. For example,
considering the complexity of deciphering the sentiment of HCPs on different products, we
understood the limitations of NLP and AI to provide accurate analysis, so we have more than
300 medical experts reviewing every activity of the HCP perform these complex tasks of sentiment
analysis for all our clients. This has been the biggest differentiation and has led us to create some
incredible features like sentiment analysis, our segmentation module, and our digital influence
module, that our competitors do not offer.
Our project managers not only spearhead the projected trajectory but amalgamate with the client
team as their very own extended team members and function as consultants.
Q: What are your expectations for Neolytica in the immediate and the long-term future?
A: I firmly believe we have been able to create very useful, actionable, and unique solutions. Our
growth trajectory reflects the degree of impact we have made, with limited marketing efforts. This
is also due to positive word-of-mouth, owing to our customers-turned-advocates because of the
unique solutions we created for them. We have maintained a more than 95% client retention rate
and our clients have not only developed a strong belief in our platform but have also corroborated
it in the form of encouraging testimonials and strong references.
In addition, we’re also rolling out a completely new platform to be launched in Q1 of 2023, which
we are calling TI Expert 2.0. This unique and enhanced solution will be completely independent
of any of the previous criteria that are usually taken from the next best action, like prescription
data, etc. This version will guide every Medical Science Liaison (MSL) and field team member on
how they can enhance their engagements with their KOLs and HCPS based on specific data
points.
Q: Given the scale of innovation inherent in biopharma, how do you manage and motivate
your teams?
A: We have always maintained a startup culture, despite not being one anymore. We work as a
family and encourage every team member to contribute their ideas toward the product
enhancement, and frequently implement them too if they add value to the client. We strive
towards keeping this open innovation-driven culture in our teams and making sure each member is
motivated with a sense of purpose to achieve excellence.
Q: So, what keeps you going in a complex industry like Biopharma?
A: The impact that we can create for the biopharma companies and the patients, gives us immense
satisfaction. In 2020 and 2021, when the entire world was struggling with the pandemic, we were
involved with one of the top 5 biopharma companies to launch their treatment against COVID. We
created the entire KOL and HCP targeting strategy for them to amplify and communicate their
medical message to more HCPs and to more patients. The sheer impact of launching a treatment
for COVID, creating a solution for battling an opioid crisis, or whenever we are mapping patient
journeys for rare diseases, like Wilson’s Disease, gives me immense pleasure to witness the
difference we are making in the real world.
Q: When did your journey with Neolytica begin? Being declared as one of the top 100
healthcare leaders in 2020 by IFAH (International Forum on Advancement in Healthcare)?
A: I first came to the United States around a decade ago to pursue my master’s degree in Drug
Discovery and Development. Around this time, I learned about the KOL mapping and targeting
strategies and their importance in the biopharma industry. Earlier in my career, I got an opportunity
to work with some of the major biopharma companies and traveled the globe. I gradually felt more
inclined towards the tech and data science side of the industry and discovered the potential of
technology and data analytics and the massive impact it could make in the biopharma industry. I
strongly felt that this industry could largely be benefitted from data science to implement effective
KOL mapping and engagement strategies. So, with this mindset, I proposed an elaborate
business plan to our CEO, Patrick Dan Boyer in 2015. Of course, he welcomed my passion and
decided to create Neolytica with the vision that I had.
Things started falling into place and we created this platform in 2016 and since then, we’ve been
able to grow every single year, by identifying significant gaps in the industry, constantly
introducing newer actionable features, and enhancing our solutions to cater to these needs. This
has created a lot of impact in the industry and helped me receive numerous awards during this
journey. It’s been a wonderful experience and I look forward to contributing to the biopharma
world.
