Influential doctors and researchers, called Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) by the pharmaceutical industry, are key to discovery and commercialization of new drugs.
But in order to find the best KOLs for a given pharmaceutical product and business strategy, pharmaceutical field researchers often have to do significant time-consuming research, and the KOLs with less exposure tend to be overlooked.
A startup working out of Chicago's health tech hub MATTER has created tech that they believe can help both pharmaceutical companies find the ideal KOLs for their product and strategy, as well as give exposure to doctors and researchers that are flying under the radar.
It's called rMark Bio. Cofounded by former Seattle-area investor and product executive Jason Smith, and University of Chicago associate professor Dr. Lev Becker, the startup offers a business intelligence platform that analyzes global health data alongside a pharmaceutical company's internal business data to create recommendations on doctors and researchers that pharmaceutical companies may have overlooked.
Here's how it works: rMarkBio's tech compares a pharmaceutical company's internal business strategy data (such as KPIs, CRMs, and sales rep data), with publicly available global health data (such as data from PubMed, data coming out of labs, grants, clinical trials, and Sunshine Act data) to recommend KOLs that match the business strategy. The medical affairs team (those behind the business strategy) can see metrics and get strategy recommendations from rMarkBio's algorithms. If they make any strategy changes, that is automatically sent to the representatives working in the field.
Medical science liaisons (MSLs) working in the field then have access to a dashboard (see above) that provides real time updates on the activity of researchers and doctors in their target field, as well as the ability to track and aggregate relationships over time. rMark Bio recommends the KOLs that best fit a pharma company's needs, along with two or three indicators as to why they're the right match for a business strategy.
"We try to answer that by showing them exactly how this person aligns with the strategy or the KPI that’s been created by the management," said Smith.
These field reps can also provide feedback to rMark Bio which helps the algorithms offer better recommendations over time, which creates "personalized intelligence" for that specific company, Smith said.
Smith and Becker launched the startup in May 2015. They've since raised $277,000 in seed funding from angel investors, and are currently working through a six-month pilot with Takeda Pharmaceuticals and are in talks to start pilots at additional pharmaceutical companies. They have seven full time employees, three part time, and they're looking to grow to 15 people by the summer.
