"Gamification" (eg, Syrum) is Just Another Way for Pharma to Mine Our Personal Data and Wisdom

Everyone I know in Pharma Twitterdom is enamored by the launch of Boehringer Ingelheim's SYRUM FaceBook game, which is available ONLY to European FB users. BI says the game is "educational" for physicians and the public:

"The research driven pharmaceutical industry is immersed in education - whether aimed at medical or pharmaceutical professionals or providing information directly to the public," says John Pugh, Director of Digital at Boehringer Ingelheim. "Gaming is an experimental way for Boehringer Ingelheim to do this. The challenge is to do this in a truly engaging, educational and entertaining way that immerses the player."

Syrum allows players to create and run their own pharmaceutical company, using a virtual laboratory to discover and develop imaginary medicines to improve the health of the world.

But "educating" the public may be a minor goal of Syrum. It surely is not something that can be measured as a key performance indicator (KPI) to justify the years and money invested in developing this "game."

So how does BI justify investing all this time and money to develop a game if it cannot measure how better educated the public is about drug development?

I believe that Syrum is designed to educate BI and NOT to educate us. It's much easier for BI to measure how much better educated IT has become due to Syrum than to measure how much better I have become from playing the game.

What do I mean by BI being "educated" due to Syrum?

Firstly, BI requires everyone who plays the game to open up their FB information for access by the company.

I was able to access the game while in Spain recently. Before I could play the game, however, I had to agree to allow BI to gain access to practically everything I do on Facebook (see screen shot below).

This stopped me dead in my tracks. Perhaps this is a normal permission request for all FB apps, but I was loathe to "allow" this kind of access for a pharma company app. It seems that BI wants to do some market research about the people who opt in to play Syrum. This kind of data could be a valuable KPI for Syrum.

I must admit that I am mystified by FB. For example, what does "Post on my behalf" mean? Whatever it is, it doesn't sound good. "Reading my checkins" also does not sit well with me. 

I'm not the only one who doesn't use apps due to privacy concerns. More than half of mobile application users have uninstalled or avoided certain apps due to concerns about the way personal information is shared or collected by the app, according to a nationally representative telephone survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project (see "Privacy and Data Management on Mobile Devices"). What applies to mobile apps also applies to FB apps - maybe even more so given FB's bad rep viz-a-viz privacy (see for example: "How Facebook Plans On Using Your Prescription Drug Purchase History, And How To Stop Them").

Another way that Syrum can educate BI rather than educating us is by allowing BI to cash in on "crowdsourcing" WITHOUT financially compensating the crowd!

BI says it has steered clear of therapeutic areas it is involved with as potential areas of interest in the Syrum game, although it has left the door open to change that. Perhaps BI's objective is to test the social aspects of the game and access the "wisdom of the crowd" to help it develop new drugs.

The pharma industry seems ready -- even desperate -- for help from the crowd to develop new drugs. Ten top U.S. and European drugmakers -- including BI -- started a nonprofit organization, called TransCelerate BioPharma, to collaborate on the problem of developing new drugs (see here).

Meanahile, Lilly's Clinical Open Innovation believes that crowdsouring can help fix drug development, which it claims is "broken." Lilly believes that "Open Innovation models – focused on clinical drug development – can result in transformational gains in value-to-patients and efficiency. We also believe that open data, linked, crowdsourced, consumed and curated by experts outside (as well as inside) the walls of pharma will bring innovative insights and wisdom. And that open communities will set and meet objectives to reduce costs and improve outcomes" (see "OMG, LCOI! Open Source Pharma: Creative Commons Coming To Pharma").

Perhaps Syrum is a precursor to that kind of "collaboration" - what I call "semi-open access" drug research. This could be of tremendous educational as well as FINANCIAL benefit to BI. And all it costs is the price of developing a game with very little payback to the crowd other than "fun" and "engagement!" P.S. On KPI I forget to mention was ROI on PR. BI recently retweeted this tweet from the PM Society: "RT @PMSociety: How is PR ROI for Syrum being measured? 50 pieces of press just from launch party. Value in positioning of @Boehringer". 50 easy "pieces of press" -- some kind of "POP"!

The $400 Million bapi Drug Failure: Are Patient Advocates the Scapegoat?

"Few people in pharma or the investment community were surprised at bapineuzumab's failure, as most odds makers put its chances for success at approximately 25 percent," said Daniel R. Hoffman, Ph.D., in a post to the Philadelphia Inquirer Check Up blog (see "Choosing between baldfaced political lies and Pharma's half-truths").

Bapineuzumab is an experimental drug for the treatment of Alzheimer's Disease (see "Pfizer and Janssen Halt Alzheimer Drug Development: Why Not Try Gamification?").

"But why do pharmas advance poor prospects to expensive, Phase 3 testing and throw half a billion dollars of shareholder money out the window in the process?"

The former head of Pfizer's R&D, John LaMattina, offered the following as a possible answer:

“Perhaps the answer lies the fact that there were groups of stakeholders who desperately wanted bapi to advance. AD [Alzheimer's Disease] patient advocacy groups would top the list. These people, who are doing their utmost to help find any treatment for this disease, would have been outraged had bapi been dropped at phase 2. Furthermore, their concerns would have been supported by leading experts in the field. Back in 2008, many of the leading experts in AD strongly believed in the science behind bapi and they would have been quite negative about ending the bapi program. Finally, dropping bapi would have caused public relations damage. Imagine the headlines: ‘Big Rich Pharma Companies Dump Promising Drug For AD. Patients, Scientists Crushed.’"

LaMattina says that he "had no part in the bapi discussions," but he suspects that Wyeth/J&J "knew that bapi had less than a 50-50 chance to succeed" and he agrees that it was a $400 million dollar gamble.

Obviously, LaMattina is just speculating on the role that Alzheimer patient advocates may have had on the decision to proceed with the phase 3 trials of bapi. But I seriously doubt that the "deciders" were worried about bad publicity if they refused to take the gamble. Drug companies, after all, pay corporate communications professionals big bucks to favorably "spin" bad news.

"Patient advocacy groups can exert some effect," said Hoffman, "but basically they stand several rungs down the influence ladder from the greed, ego and similar motives of senior executives. The area where patient advocacy groups scream the loudest concerns the exorbitant pricing of drugs for their respective therapeutic areas. Yet pharmas seldom let these plaintive cries influence their inexorable price increases. Certainly the patient groups didn't deter pharma's industry-wide strategy of pricing as many new products as possible at the vastly higher level of biologicals and, for some, even into the orphan drug stratosphere."

True that!

Dr. Hoffman complains of "half-truths and misdirecting statements that pharma's cheerleaders now communicate regularly" when referring to LaMattina's analysis. LaMattina, said Hoffman, "didn't place even a smidgeon of responsibility at the feet of fiduciary officers and senior R&D people who receive bonuses based upon the number of compounds they advance to Phase 3. Nor did he state that C-suite people uniformly believe they look better to shareholders by throwing a Hail Mary pass against a stacked secondary, rather than limiting their losses by punting the ball."

Football: Another reference to games! See my post cited above.

Obviously, drug development is a risky business - high risk vs. high reward. These days, however, the rewards are less "stratospheric" than they used to be.

Instead of looking for scapegoats -- whether they be patient advocates or C-suite football quarterback wanabees -- we should talk about the broken pharma business model and how to change it to be less risky. A guest Forbes post by Christopher Bowe, the US Healthcare Analyst at Informa Scrip, addresses this issue in his analyis of the bapi failure:

"To save itself - and save more patients - the industry should take two vital steps: develop a more flexible approach to drug approval and patent exclusivity and change its business model to encourage more scientific collaboration among companies," said Bowe. "The first change is relatively closer to our grasp; the second requires a sea change in the industry" (see "Big Pharma Failures Light the Way to Change").

On that note, I invite you to read this Pharma Marketing News article: "Crowd Sourced Creative Commons Drug Information" (subscription required) and/or this Pharma Marketing Blog post: "OMG, LCOI! Open Source Pharma: Creative Commons Coming To Pharma."

An open crowd-sourced approach to pharmaceutical research is not a hairbrained idea. An article in today's Wall Street Journal describes how the U.S. military is using crowdsourcing to design a new amphibious vehicle for the Marines (see "Tapping Crowds for Military Design"; subscription required). "The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, known as Darpa, is preparing to assess whether crowdsourcing, a freewheeling collaborative method sometimes used to develop software, can be an effective means of designing military equipment."

IMHO, if the military can handle open source data sharing without revealing secrets, so can the pharmaceutical industry.

Tracking Public Health Trends: Twitter vs Google vs Your Nose

While my son was away at school this spring, I asked him how he was doing. "OK dad," he said, "but I have this cough the last few days." I didn't have to search Google or call our physician or tweet about it to learn what may be the underlying problem. I only had to use my nose to know it was allergy season. Given my son's history, I surmised that was the root cause of his problem.

But public health officials cannot depend upon their noses to make important decisions. They need actionable real time data. How do they get it?

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) offers the most dependable disease surveillance data. The system depends on reports from partners in state, local, and territorial health departments, public health and clinical laboratories, vital statistics offices, healthcare providers, clinics, and emergency departments. I imagine a lot of paperwork and time are involved.

Some time ago, Google decided that search trends can be used to track diseases such as influenza. It published results of a study of its data in a white paper: "Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data" (find it here). They found a strong correlation between search data and CDC data as shown in the chart below:

Now, researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing have analyzed 2 billion public tweets posted between May 2009 and October 2010 to learn if it is possible to use Twitter to track important public health trends (see "Analyzing Twitter for Public Health").

The researchers point out the differences between search and Twitter (or other social media) with regard to the intent of the user. "In web search," says Mark Dredze (one of the researchers; see a video of his presentation of results here), "the user expresses a need for information. Whereas in social media, people actually say something about themselves." In that sense, it's easier to conclude that the Twitter poster actually has the flu, whereas the searcher may or may not.

Another advantage of Twitter is that people disclose a lot of information about themselves that can add value to the public health data. This includes information about the drugs they may be taking. That information, of course, is of interest to pharmaceutical companies.

Here are the results from the Johns Hopkins study, which analyzed 1.5 million messages (out of 2 billion total collected) that referred to health matters:

Pharmaceutical companies -- and the FDA (see "FDA is Monitoring This Blog and Perhaps You Too!") -- are already mining social media to learn what the public is saying about them, their products, and their competitors' products (see "Are J&J Agents Trolling for Adverse Events on the Internet?"). But I suspect the technology they are using is relatively primitive compared to that used by the Johns Hopkins researchers.

Alex Butler posed a question during yesterday's #hcsmeu chat: "Have we been concentrating too much on SM as pure communication and not enough on impact of 'big data' to revolutionise health care?" This lead to a lively discussion on the value of "crowdsourcing" to somehow change healthcare. For more on that topic, see "Data Mining in the Deep, Dark Social Networks of Patients."

I can see the value of social media to do surveillance as was done in the studies mentioned above. Such surveillance certainly helps public health officials deal with certain diseases and other health issues (ie, obesity). But it doesn't change the fundamental problem of health care, which is the cost burden. To truly "revolutionise" healthcare -- IMHO -- you have to lower costs and make even rudimentary health care affordable for EVERYONE. But that's a matter for another post!

[This post originally appeared in Pharma Marketing Blog. 

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