Publicis Health Media Launches New Business Intelligence Practice
Trending Now: The new practice aims to optimize healthcare media and marketing by applying health outcomes data to marketing effectiveness.
Publicis Health Media (PHM), an agency that fuses media into a dedicated health and wellness specialty, has created a new business intelligence (BI) practice to use health outcomes data and apply it to marketing effectiveness. PHM’s new BI practice is led by Dave Nussbaum as senior VP and Sharon Patent as its VP/group director.
PHM’s aims to drive accountability, produce better treatment results, and reduce waste for the health media marketplace. By helping to better educate patients and improve outcomes based on measureable results, brands will be able to more effectively manage limited health media resources. PHM can now help clients make more informed decisions through actual HCP (healthcare professionals) and anonymous-patient behavior tied to each media type, placement and channel.
“We are creating vital tools and ways of thinking that support brands as they assess the HCP-patient relationship," says Matt McNally, president of Publicis Health Media. “These methods bring new insights about the drivers of treatment behavior and allow us to make adjustments to more efficiently target, buy, and optimize media. We are now able to adjust media plans to be sure they are targeting the right audience with the right message at the right time for the right price. This level of precision and analysis can help brands spend their media dollars more wisely, ensure effective messaging, and help build better relationships between brands and their targeted HCP’s and patients."
Neon Therapeutics Launches to Develop Cancer Immunotherapies
Third Rock Ventures has formed Neon Therapeutics, an immuno-oncology company
developing neoantigen-based therapeutic vaccines and T-cell therapies to treat cancer. Neon Therapeutics is focused on unlocking the full potential of the immune system to recognize and attack cancer via targeting proteins known as neoantigens. Clal Biotechnology Industries and Access Industries joined Third Rock Ventures in a $55 million Series A financing.
Neoantigens, which result from mutations occurring during tumor growth, are recognized as foreign and differ from native antigens to which the immune system is tolerant. Neon Therapeutic is developing multiple programs in therapeutic vaccines and T-cell modalities. The company’s lead program, NEO-PV-01, is a personalized neoantigen vaccine that builds upon research done by the Broad Institute and Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.
“Recent advances in immuno-oncology place us at a point that is unprecedented in the history of cancer drug development," says Cary Pfeffer, M.D., interim CEO of Neon Therapeutics. “We have a completely new understanding of the immune system’s role in unlocking powerful mechanisms to induce immune attack of tumors, representing an enormous opportunity for precision therapies for cancer patients. These insights enable Neon Therapeutics to develop therapies that are complementary to current immunomodulatory therapies and may significantly enhance the specificity and potency of existing approaches."
International Collaborative Forms to Remove Barriers for Personalized Medicine
A broad community of industry stakeholders has come together to form and launch the first-of-its-kind organization to enable collaboration in personalized/precision medicine (PM). The PM Connective is a U.S.-based not-for-profit firm whose founding partners are comprised of board members and advisors from Biogen, bluebird bio, CAHG, Cardinal Health, Diaceutics, the European Personalised Medicine Association, George James Ltd, and Vivia Biotech.
“Each of the stakeholders in the current healthcare business model focus on costs and clinical benefits within their respective silos; however, at a disease outcomes level, this may be a suboptimal solution," says Jeff Waldron, executive director of the PM Connective. (PV)