Medical affairs departments have increasingly moved from marketing over the past six years. More than two-thirds of pharma companies have centralized medical affairs (MA), and roughly half align the function by therapeutic area.

 released last week by Cutting Edge Information. The study tracks how pharma has repositioned MA since 2002 and how money is allocated within the department.

The study was based on interviews with 14 pharma companies and focused on seven functions: thought leader development, MSL programs, publications. information, education, investigator-initiated trials, and grants.


The biggest change was MA's shift away from marketing and into a stand-alone division. In 2002, 43 percent of MA personnel said they reported to the marketing division. Today, only 7 percent do so.

Of the departments surveyed, 14 percent now report to a stand-alone MA function, a division that didn't even exist in most companies in 2002, according to Cutting Edge.

"The medical affairs function has been elevated within pharmaceutical organizations because of compliance reasons, such as the OIG guidelines, and the restructuring of departments stemming from new regulations," says Amanda Zuniga, senior research analyst at Cutting Edge. "KOLs and thought leaders are branching out from marketing and becoming much more focused than previously."


Accordingly, marketing no longer bankrolls the bulk of MA expenses. The data shows that 68 percent of MA costs are now covered by an MA-specific budget and another 18 percent comes from R&D. On average, the marketing department contributed only 7 percent.

"This is being done to ensure that medical affairs is focused more on the science of the pharma business, rather than risking MSLs having marketing influence," Zuniga said. "It gives them the opportunity to not be tied to marketing and to focus on what the clinical data is really saying."


On average, pharma companies allocate an annual $31.37 million to MA. That budget covers medical science liaison programs (18 percent of the total budget), thought leaders (16 percent), investigator-initiated trials (15 percent), publications (13 percent), education (11 percent), information (8 percent) and grants (4 percent). Functions not included in this list account for 15 percent of the average budget. Variations from company to company are, needless to say, considerable.

Look at the same functions in terms of staffing, and MSL programs receive 31 percent of full-time equivalents, 11 percentage points more than thought leaders. Med-ed employees accounted for only 9 percent of total staffing.

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News Analysis

A new study looks at the movement of thought leaders and medical science liaisons from primarily marketing to other areas of the pharma company. Though the shift might be minor (7 percent since 2002), it might be a sign of things to come.

Pharma Shuffles Thought Leaders

Physicians might soon have an excuse to swap their BlackBerries for fancy newish Apple iPhones. The super-secretive computer firm announced earlier this month that it would release development kits allowing third-party applications to be created for the phone.

Apple's unusual move could be a boon for physicians who are increasingly trading in pen and paper for more high-tech handheld devices. At last they will have the opportunity to use mobile software that goes beyond the underwhelming processing power of personal digital assistants (PDAs) and BlackBerry-style devices.

Epocrates, one of the best-known of the medical and drug software developers, was on hand to present its application at Apple's recent press conference premiering its software development kit (SDK). The Epocrates program features drug dosing information, retail pricing updates, and up-to-the-minute adverse reaction reporting.


In addition, Epocrates has taken advantage of the high-resolution graphics on the iPhone by building a drug identifier feature into its program. Physicians can look up a pill by color and description and match it to a sample a patient brings in.

"It's getting harder for sales reps to meet with doctors, and we provide a tool to establish a relationship with a physician and deliver messaging," Kirk Loevner, chairman and CEO of Epocrates, told Pharm Exec on Monday. Programs such as Doc Alerts transmit key pharma studies or journal articles straight to a physician's device. With the iPhone, pharma companies can also create richer mobile continuing-ed programs, including video and graphics branded with pharma messaging.


Until a few weeks ago, Apple had all software development for the phone under lockdown. This meant that software makers creating programs for iPhone integration were forced to run them over the Internet through the phone's Web browser.

"We are seeing an increasing interest in the iPhone as a platform for physicians and healthcare professionals," said Loevner. "In a survey of our users, the iPhone was the number one device that they were looking at purchasing over the next 12 months."

Biotech giant Genentech also got a callout at the SDK event. According to Apple, Genentech has thousands of iPhones deployed in its company.

"Genentech's pilot with iPhone has shown its potential to be the most useful business mobility tool we've ever used," stated Todd Pierce, vice president at Genentech. "We now have 3,000 planned for deployment based on how easy and simple it was to integrate iPhone with our corporate e-mail system."

Neither Genentech nor Apple would return calls querying how the pilot is working or what other uses they have for the phone.

Epocrates expects its physician suite of software to ship in 2008.

Now that Apple has opened its iPhone to third-party software developers, healthcare productivity programs are leading the charge. Here?s a preview of one of the frontrunners.

Pharmaceutical Executive-03-26-2008

Pharma Shuffles Thought Leaders

The iPhone as a Physician Resource