“This financing provides us with the resources to aggressively advance CYT107 through clinical trials, particularly in the HIV and hepatitis markets,” said Michel Morre, the president and CEO of Cytheris. “After demonstrating the quality of IL-7 induced immune reconstitution in most patients treated in our HIV studies, we are now focusing these investigations on showing that repeated cycles of IL-7 can induce long term or definitive immune restoration, while our HCV and HBV studies are aimed at documenting the production of specific antiviral T cells, potentially offering long term protection.”

A new investor, France’s CDC Entreprises, participated in the round along with existing investors Bioam Gestion, Caisse de dépôt et Placement du Québec, CDC Innovation, Crédit Agricole Private Equity, and Forbion Capital Partners from The Netherlands.

- here’s the Cytheris release

Related Articles:
Is the market for biotech start-ups coming back to life?
What do biotech VCs want?
Smart biotech money betting on innovation

Read more here
France’s Cytheris banks $15M for immunotherapy work

Bayer is taking half of Pfizer’s old space near UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay campus, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. And Nektar Therapeutics (NASDAQ: NKTR), which is relocating from San Carlos, is taking the other half. The Innovation Center will be run by Bayer Vice President of Biologics Research Terry Hermiston.

“We wanted to be where the cutting-edge research was being done and there was space available,” said Hermiston. Bayer also wanted to be where it could take advantage of San Francisco’s tax credit program for biotech workers.

UCSF Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann, who directed one of the biotech industry’s most successful development programs while at Genentech, has been stirring the biotech pot as well. She recently called for some heavy thinking about building a better biotech cluster in the Bay Area.

- here’s the story from the San Francisco Chronicle

Related Articles:
Bayer exec says company will hike R&D spending
Pfizer moves employees to San Francisco

Read more from the original source
Bayer to open biotech Innovation Center in Pfizer’s old SF digs

The recently enacted healthcare reform legislation provides up to $1 billion in tax credits and cash grants for life sciences companies with 250 or fewer employees that have made or will make “qualified investments” in “qualifying therapeutic discovery projects” during 2009 and 2010. Credits and grants will be awarded through a competitive application process which is expected to commence on or before May 21, 2010.

A “qualifying therapeutic discovery project” is a project which is designed to develop a product, process or therapy to diagnose, treat or prevent diseases and afflictions by (1) conducting pre-clinical activities, clinical trials, clinical studies and research protocols, or (2) developing technology or products designed to diagnose diseases and conditions, including molecular and companion drugs and diagnostics, or to further the delivery or administration of therapeutics.

A “qualified investment” is the aggregate amount of the costs paid or incurred in 2009 or 2010 for expenses necessary for and directly related to the conduct of a qualifying therapeutic discovery project, subject to certain limitations and exclusions. The tax credits are equal to 50 percent of the qualified investment, and taxpayers may elect to receive the credits in the form of a cash grant. Any such grant is not includable in the taxpayer’s gross income. The availability of a cash grant significantly increases the appeal of the program to companies in a loss position who may not otherwise be able to immediately utilize the credits. Furthermore, unlike the grants available under the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, corporations that are majority owned by venture capital funds should be eligible for cash grants based on their qualified investments.

Companies must apply to the Secretary of the Treasury in order to obtain certification for qualified investments.

Before you get find yourself in a social media crisis, you should have a Social Media Implementation Plan. I’m not certain that many pharmaceutical companies are doing systematic planning. Many may be launching apps without any plan at all!

Several months ago at an industry conference focused on ePharma marketing, I led a small group discussion about what pharmaceutical companies need to do BEFORE they engage in social media promotion or disease awareness or patient support programs. The group came up with the following list, which is a pretty good outline of an social media implementation plan:

• Unblock corporate access to social media so employees can access applications such as Facebook while at work
• Have a sustained vision/goal
• Become a dialogue company – learn how to listen and respond, not just push messages out
• Get everyone – including marketing – on board
• Develop guideposts, internal standard operating procedures
• Training
• Develop a moderation strategy
• Marshall necessary resources – use the best tools available
• Hire a social media Tsar

The order of items in this list is more or less the order in which the group shouted them out to me as I was compiling the list. It may or may not be the order in which a plan would be implemented in the real world by your typical pharma company.

The first item on the list seems the simplest, but it was only recently that Pfizer, for example, implemented this. At least that’s what I recall from a recent Tweet. A little while ago, Len Starnes, Head of Digital Marketing & Sales, General Medicine at Bayer Schering Pharma, polled his LinkedIn colleagues asking “Does your pharmaceutical company permit social media monitoring?” The chart below shows the results.

There are plenty of restrictions to access. Without access how can your employees learn enough about social media to follow your social media plan let alone design one and implement it?

In my “Rate Your Social Media Readiness Self-Assessment Survey” I asked respondents how often they used| social media applications. The pharma respondents answered the question as shown in the following chart:

Less than 40% say they use social media frequently.

Instead of going through the plan items one-by-one, I ask my readers — you — to post a comment about your favorite item on the list or add your own. No doubt, we’ll have more to say about this in my conversation with Dennis Urbaniak.

Also, regarding “guideposts, internal standard operating procedures,” many pharmacos expressed their ideas on this in their official comments to the FDA. I will be reviewing those ideas in the March issue of Pharma Marketing News (see the preview here).

Meanwhile, in today’s #hcsmeu Twitter discussion, Manu Filed (@manufield) asked “How can Pharma Snr Mgt best be briefed on SM, and what r the barriers we need to overcome? Who already ‘gets it’?”
Some responses:

@andrewspong I thought about COs inviting SM specialists after “the Nestle situation” in my blog http://bit.ly/9C8Cjp

@manufield Not a Q of ‘when’, but ‘how’. Pharma needs to suppress its organizational immune system. Cf. analogy http://bit.ly/9sDqYz

@blogaceutics To create a group of digital natives to guide an internal process and recommend to snr mgt to use SM internally to better adapt

@chibbie: q2 how about invite outside experts that don’t have pharma associations #hcsmeu Best digi practice from other industry

@SM_Intern I heard that @pharmaguy asks his fees when working w pharma be donated to favorite charity. http://bit.ly/bf6pgP

Read the original here
What’s Your Social Media Implementation Plan?

What Sanofi-Aventis Learned from Its FaceBook Experience & What the Experts Recommend It Do Now

A conversation with Dennis Urbaniak, VP U.S. Diabetes at sanofi-aventis, about the recent activity on S-A’s VOICES corporate Facebook page. We’ll discuss the lessons learned and hear advice from independent experts. Urbaniak is willing to answer questions and consider advice from listeners.

A FREE Pharma Marketing Talk LIVE Podcast and Online Chat!
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 * 9 AM Eastern US

So, I welcome all the “experts” out there who think they can contribute to the “learning experience” to not only listen in, but to call in and join the discussion. The number to call is (347) 996-5894. Talk to you then!

Read more from the original source
What Has Sanofi-Aventis Learned from Its Facebook Experience?

What Would Steve Jobs Do?

What Would Google Do?

What Would Jake and Rocket Do?

These are champs.

What would a ‘new marketing’ champ do in Pharma and Healthcare?

Here are 9 imperatives I see for Pharma Marketers as we enter 2010 and a new decade:

1.  Adopt human-centered thinking across everything you do. Both Steve Jobs and Google share a relentless focus on knowing and pleasing their core customer – the consumer. No detail is ignored if it brings value. Importantly, these champs don’t think of consumers sporadically or when it’s convenient, but in every decision and action they take.  The customer experience is front and center from beginning to the end.Pharma and Healthcare marketers: are patients at the center of everything you do? Really? As Steve Jobs might ask, are you taking full responsibility for your patient/e-patient user experience? Are you thinking about every touch along the treatment pathway, that is no longer a straight linear line, but made of multiple touches, information and influences often hitting at once and with circular repetition? (You may also want to read: Is Your Brand Patient-Centered? 5 Critical Success Factors)

2. Get outta town. Experience and see what your patients see. What are your patients’ challenges? How could you help? How can you insure that learning is turned into action back in the office? Who should ‘own’ a particular learning or insight and see it through? Pharma and Healthcare Marketers: is listening and learning part of your everyday doings? What are consumers and patients saying about you? your product? your service? What are they saying on twitter? Facebook? patient communities? How are patients rating your brand on sites such as iGuard? (You may also want to read Jonathan Richman’s Dose of Digital blog: The Best Pharma Products According to Patients)

3. Simplify. Challenge your product and marketing design: Is it simple enough? Simplify your products and services; simplify your customers’ lives; simplify your own life…Create simple experiences.  Think about starting a search on Google…or picking up an iPod…Pharma and Healthcare Marketers: During every step of product development and marketing planning: stop and ask yourself: If Steve Jobs was the Product Manager on this, what would he do? Is the design and implementation  of your product/program flawless?

4. Embrace publicness and openness. Transform your relationship with the public in every quarter of the organization.  You may extend this new relationship in many ways from blogging, interacting with bloggers and e-Patients, participating in twitter or Facebook, customer service and sharing ideas.  Overtime, you may even truly involve customers in the real-time design process for products and/or services…But ‘publicness’ is much more than having a web site. It’s about taking actions in public so people can see what you do and react to it, make suggestions, and tell their friends.  Living in public is a matter of enlightened self interest. You have to be public to be found. Every time you decide not to make something public, you create the risk of a customer not finding you or not trusting you because you’re keeping secrets….the more public you are, the easier you can be found, the more opportunities your have…(Read Privacy (and Publicness) by Jeff Jarvis Buzz Machine)

5. Don’t try to control content and distribution, and think about how you can bring your customers ‘elegant organization’. First, think in distributor ways.  Go to your consumer whenever and however you can.  This is still the opposite of many companies who continue to think centralized and want to make consumers come to them.  They spend large dollars to advertise to attract consumers.  Many try to make their home pages into destinations.  In sum, while many internet sites think of themselves as an end–Google thinks of itself as a means.  While many see the job of their home page to take you to where they want you to go, Google sees its home page as the way to get you to where you want to go.  Google distributes itself.  Google enables others to use tools as they wish. Think of your site as ‘answers for every question you can imagine’.

Second, it will also be helpful to think about ‘elegant organization’ as Jeff Jarvis outlined in What Would Google Do?–Mark Zuckerberg originally coined the phrase to stress that communities already exist… As marketers, entrepreneurs and technologists, we can benefit from these communities by providing them with elegant organization. Help them do what they are already doing better.  Pharma: how can you aggregate and curate useful and valuable content for your patients/ customers? How can you replace focus on mass market with focus on mass of niches? And how can you provide helpful content consistently?

6. Think mobile. Engage real-time with your customers 24/7. Mobile doesn’t have to be just about apps; consider the value of texting, geolocators, and/or the use of quick response (QR) codes for simplification…

7. Takers may eat well, but givers sleep well. While most will wait for the FDA guidelines to be published for social media and web, some will move forward to listen, learn and to “give as well as to take.” There are still opportunities for Pharma to learn, and support patients and their communities, especially if Pharma starts to see themselves not only as products, but as a service, a platform, a means to enabling others. The bottom line: help your patients (and customers) build value. One new example may be the launch of the new Patients Like Me Epilepsy Community in Partnership with UCB. (While UCB is a client, I have nothing to do with their epilepsy business.)

8. Do one thing really really well–focus on what’s most important.  Each champ does one thing really, really well.  Google never loses sight of what search means to their business strategy, and in their continuous focus for improvement of search, it continually spurs other applications and new products/services. Apple never loses site of flawless and simple design for maximum consumer appeal. Jake and Rocket for Life is Good always stay close to their roots of humor and humility. What does your company or brand do really well? Where can you focus resources to continually innovate?

9. Raise Your Bar. Good isn’t good enough. If you don’t think it would pass Steve Job’s bar, then don’t let it pass yours…Or you can think like Google: being great is a starting point, not an endpoint. But as Steve Jobs says, Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Welcome to the new decade of new-marketing–any other imperatives that you’d like to add or delete from this list? Please do share!

Despite many gloomy predictions for DTC advertising and the pharma industry overall, there’s never been a better time for marketers to forward their brands and consumers’ lives with new thinking about what constitutes patient marketing in the 21st Century (DTC 21).  Ten prescriptions can help improve focus and strengthen DTC efforts in 2010.  Important media and technology trends are also “musts” to actively consider for those who want to bump impact and value.

1. Adopt an updated definition for DTC that considers the full picture of how consumers will interpret and interact with a brand TODAY. This calls for attention beyond “big bang” marketing spends, and begs for identifying meaningful levers to drive education and growth. DTC is no longer just an awareness or acquisition vehicle to move “eyeballs” through a linear marketing funnel; it’s every influence and touch needed to bring new information and education, help convert, instill loyalty and inspire advocacy.
2. Consider “long-tail” marketing; don’t be afraid to focus on smaller targets that matter. Long tail marketing has the potential to treat consumers as individuals with unique interests and needs.
3. Go to your consumer–surround them where they get their facts, learn, and socialize. Today’s consumer is not looking for your marketing messages.  Study after study points to both the growth of the Internet, and the fact that consumers and e-patients get their information from multiple sources. (The Social Life of Health Information – PEW Internet and American Life Project) Depending on your target, this suggests a mix of relevant touches and begs for the right combination of off line and on line media and social media tactics.
   
4. Move beyond selling to engaging and providing meaningful marketing and value. Look for new ways to extend patient value, and support a more positive customer experience along each and every touch point. This also means giving consumers and e-patients what they are looking for and not just your “brand sell”. Engagement requires looking at each patient as a unique human being who, by the way, would “rather not e your customer” (After all, who wants to have a chronic condition and take medication for the trust of their life, whether it be your rand or a competitors?). Think hard how you might provide relevant value real-time, every time. To improve engagement, 6 C’s are crucial:  1) Content that is based on meaningful insights and provides context; 2) Customization via new ways to personalize treatment, process or support; 3) Conversation is encouraged for better service, learning and sharing: 4) Confidence is built with trust and transparency; 5) Community Connectedness – directly or indirectly- create your own, or better yet, tap into an existing one; and 6) Consistent Commitment is demonstrated to your customer base–no one shot deals here.
5. Consumer power is a fact of life requiring brands and companies to walk and talk “patient-centered” – consumers are finely tuned to what’s valuable and authentic. Ask yourself one simple question over and over:  Will this bring meaningful value to our patients?
6. Keep your brand’s strategic core strong and grounded, despite the onslaught of messages and tactics, and the speed with which they require action. A strong core requires a compelling and relevant brand promise that focuses every strategy and tactic so they’re synergistic and supportive. The payoff is staying on message by protecting the brand from chasing every new, cool digital and new media tactic coming your way.
   
7. Insist on elegant solutions that do more with less. Smaller budgets don’t negate innovation and may have just the opposite effect in spurring new thinking.
8. Don’t overlook the details. While they may seem small and trivial, find out which are important to patients and their families. This can help instill better ROI efficiencies.
9. Refresh brand metrics and measurement to drive current brand objectives and initiatives. Think beyond traditional reach and frequency measures and try to ensure a flow of metrics and measurement from beginning to end of the patient “buying process” for maximum learning.
   
10. Be the best listeners in you category. Listen with vigilance, and act on learning across the organization. Listening, and what you do with your learning, is the responsibility of the entire organization.  Be sure that each ‘tweet” or customer learning gets mapped back to a rightful “owner’ in the organization.

In 2010, important media, social platforms and technology trends can’t be neglected. Below are some helpful questions to ask as media and technology continue to quickly change (yes…an understatement!):

2010 Media, Social Platforms and Technology Trends—Questions to ask:

1. Internet growth is not new, but does your consumer budget match the web’s growing consumption as a source for healthcare information gathering, engagement and community?

2. Is Organic and Paid Search optimized? Are you using ‘Smart Advertising’ that incorporates behavioral insights? Is a plan in place to address Google Sidewikis?

3. Are you tapping into the growth of web for entertainment? People are increasingly watching TV on the internet via YouTube and Hulu.

4. Is a Social Media Strategy in place that fits with current customer habits? Top platforms to consider: Viral Video, Facebook, My Space, Twitter, Blogs –branded and unbranded, company and brand/condition specific.  Keep it social, targeted and consider events based marketing.

5. How are you leveraging Mobile’s tremendous opportunity for real-time, 24/7 communication and engagement?  Text sells, Apps amplify and use of QR codes can simplify.

6. Games For Health?

7. Augmented Reality? Use it to entertain, educate and engage.

8. Real-time listening in place? Or a panel established for on-going market research and learning e.g.,Communispace?

Pharma: Are you ready for 2010?  Despite continued budget tightening and generic growth, and open areas such as health  reform and  FDA social media and web guidelines, it’s going to be a big year for those willing to step up and experiment with new ways of marketing and ‘not marketing’…What do you think?

Other Suggested Reading:

The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More by Chris Anderson. Wikipedia’s summary of long tail here.

Pharma: Are Current DTC Ads Meaningful? The Next Evolution of Marketing My Book review.

The Next Evolution of Marketing: Connect with your Customers by Marketing with Meaning by Bob Gilbreath, Bridge Worldwide

Susannah Fox, PEW Research Center: The Social Life off Health Information, Twitter and Status Updated, Fall 2009

Pharma: Is Your Brand Patient Centered? 5 Critical Success Factors by Ellen Hoenig, MedAd News, November, 2009

I love You More Than My Dog: 5 Decisions that Drive Extreme Customer Loyalty In Good Times and Badby J. Bliss

Strong Brand Core: More Core Than Ever?

Pharma: Is Your Marketing Designed to Engage and Educate or Sell? My book review of Listen First Sell Later by Bob Poole

Pharma: Do You Elegantly Use What You Have? My book review of In Pursuit of Elegance by Matthew E May

Photo Credit:  Courtney Justice/The Cournell Group

Everyone who works in crisis communications, or who may experience a crisis, should read this posting.

The science of crisis communications got both faster, and more challenging with the advent of Twitter and the blogosphere.

For example, behind the steering wheel to the left, the paddle controls the headlights. The paddle to the right, controls the windshield wipers. On the steering wheel itself, the left buttons the CD player and cellphone interface, while the buttons to the right serve as the stereo system’s volume control.

While this seems like pretty simple stuff (that you can find on other cars), there is something about the way MINI has implemented these features that actually increases the net experience when you drive.

The MINI’s user experience got me thinking about the optimal mobile user experience, since mobile is quickly becoming a ubiquitous channel for directly delivering health-related content. For pharmaceutical companies, mobile offers a much wider reach and anywhere/anytime interaction for the 65% of all physicians carrying mobile devices on their hip.

To create an optimal mobile user experience, companies need to be aware that development for mobile is not always straightforward because of a variety of devices (BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm, etc.), number of browsers, platforms and a number of networks that may or not be compatible. In other words, merely adapting desktop applications to mobile devices isn’t going to work.

Mobile users want faster, shorter transaction times, a secure environment and a user experience that is simple and positive.

There is no question that developing for mobile can be a challenge, but one approach is to develop a personalized user experience that takes into consideration the device being used, where it will be used and how.

That means, one size does not fit all, but – with a little investigating – you can uncover one best approach that works specifically for your target audience.

Read the original here
Defining the Optimal User Experience for Mobile

Demontrating the Value of Innovation

Pharmacy & Therapeutics April 2009

Read the original article at AdPharm Blog – Genentech