inVentive, which provides a range of clinical and commercial offerings to clients in the drug industry, said that PMG’s expertise in data collection and management will expand its own business, particularly in terms of improving its patient compliance and monitoring operations.
Under the terms of the deal PMG, which will be integrated into inVentive’s existing patient outcomes setup, also stands to receive a series of earn-out payments if certain financial performance targets are achieved.
inVentive CEO Blane Walter explained that: “PMG has an impressive history of connecting with patients to help them understand their conditions, effectively manage their treatments and ultimately achieve better health outcomes.”
Walter added that PMG will “complement our existing patient outcomes offering and will support our clients’ growing need for enhanced patient communications.”
"Patient Marketing Group has built a reputation for exceptional patient communication programs and has developed many long-term relationships with top pharmaceutical companies," commented Lynn Benzing, PMG’s CEO.
Improving patient communication has potential benefits for both drug safety and development. Timely knowledge that a proposed administration method or candidate delivery device has a detrimental impact on compliance may allow drugmakers to adjust development programs.
Additionally, effective post marketing monitoring of compliance and safety issues will feedback into the development of new therapeutic products. As a result, firms that offer commercial and data management services are likely to benefit as big pharma companies continue to outsource non-core activities to industry specialists.
Personalized medicine
Princeton-headquartered PMG was set up 18 years ago with the dual goals of improving patient education and treatment adherence. Services that the firm provides to industrial clients like AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly and Merck & Co include direct-to-patient strategies, research, data-mining and online promotion.
Aside from treatment compliance issues, the emerging personalized and gene-based medicines market offers considerable scope for data management and mining experts like PMG.
For example, the ability to rapidly identify which cancer patients in a clinical trial are most likely to benefit from a treatment, based on genetic profile analysis, allows for the reactive modification of treatment protocols.
In addition, post marketing analysis of the relationship between patient data and therapeutic efficacy may identify trends that have been missed or were beyond the scope of developmental studies. This approach has the potential to improve both efficacy and drug safety.