Using Social Media as an Early Predictor of a New Drug's Market Share

According to Gideon Mantel, co-founder and CEO of Treato, social media can predict the success of a new drug launch much faster than traditional methods."Many pharmaceutical companies try to measure the success of their launch based on weekly script trends," said Mantel in a blog post (here). "The difference between social media data and data derived from prescriptions is significant: social media data can predict the future, while script data record the past."To illustrate this, Treato looked at patient-written social media posts on over 2,000 health blogs and forums to find mentions of Tecfidera (formerly called BG-12 during clinical trials), a new multiple sclerosis drug that Biogen launched on April 13. Since the launch of Tecfidera in mid-April, the most talked about MS drug in social media has been Tecfidera, bypassing all other MS medications and growing on a daily basis (see chart below):The following is an edited conversation I had with Mantel:listen to ‘Using Social Media as an Early Predictor of a New Drug's Market Share’ on Audioboo(function() { var po = document.createElement("script"); po.type = "text/javascript"; po.async = true; po.src = "http://d15mj6e6qmt1na.cloudfront.net/assets/embed.js"; var s = document.getElementsByTagName("script")[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(po, s); })();(function() { var po = document.createElement("script"); po.type = "text/javascript"; po.async = true; po.src = "http://d15mj6e6qmt1na.cloudfront.net/assets/embed.js"; var s = ...
Source: Pharma Marketing Blog - Category: Pharma Commentators Tags: social media Source Type: blogs