Linking Science With Outcomes - Addressing Drug Complexity and Hunger for Medical Knowledge with MSLs
Is the writing on the wall for traditional pharmaceutical sales reps or is there potential to build connections with high calibre scientific teams and foster a new face of pharma sales?
Lucy Brake talks with Shaju Backer, Managing Director Australia & New Zealand at Merck Serono Pty Ltd, about his perspective on the value Medical Science Liaisons can offer the pharma industry and the importance of medical education in this debate.
Whilst not a novel concept, the Medical Science Liaison (MSL) role is certainly an evolving one in the pharma industry; some companies have been employing these highly skilled professionals for a number of years and others are just embarking this pathway. The role might well have different names depending on the country and company they work for, but in an increasingly vertically integrated industry, MSLs are becoming essential in linking drug development teams with the scientists and clinicians, working with the sales force.
The main purpose of MSLs is to foster relationships with key people in the industry, mainly researchers and clinicians. In this way they can feed information both ways. They deliver knowledge and scientific insights about the market and competitors to their company and they can support clients with extra information and scientific data above and beyond that which a sales rep would have access to.
Backer has been working in the pharma industry for a number of years, both dealing with biological products and with biosimilars in a number of countries including US, UK and Australia, meaning he has gained a valuable perspective on this emerging role of MSLs. “With novel pathways and highly specialized pharmaceuticals emerging through the pharmaceutical pipeline, it is important to strike the balance between quantity and quality of the sales force interaction.” He is of the opinion that the classical way to measure sales, through frequency and coverage, is becoming obsolete in these highly specialised areas and the future lies in integrating the role of the MSL and sales in an ethical and compliant way.
After talking with clinicians over the years, the message was consistent that delivering up-to-date scientific and clinical data through medical education and other avenues is where much of the added-value comes that the industry can deliver to support the clinicians and ultimately patients. One of the challenges with this is that much of the data on medicines and clinical trials is highly sensitive until it has been published, meaning it simply cannot be part of the discussion that sales reps are having with their clients. “Classic sales reps cannot deliver this type of information,” he comments. This is where the MSLs can increasingly become part of the conversation when you are dealing with highly specialized pharmaceuticals where the treatment paradigms change rapidly, or sometimes new safety information becomes available.
Backer’s opinion on sales teams is that there is some huge potential in using MSLs to build real value with customers and hiring high calibre teams with scientific knowledge to help create dialogue and add value into relationships: “It is not just about giving your drug to a patient, it is about delivering the right risk benefit profile information on a highly specialized drug to a clinician, so he or she can identify the correct patient who can benefit from the drug, and equally, enable the clinician to identify the patient who should not be given the drug if the risks outweigh the benefits. We need to be a part of that conversation. Indeed it is our obligation to do that as a supporter of Australian Medicines Policy and Quality use of Medicines.”
From his perspective, the effectiveness with which the industry is currently using MSLs varies depending on the country and the company. He notes that the UK pharmaceutical market adopted the MSL model at an early stage as the sales force already had a broader role. The sales teams were generally hired for both their scientific knowledge and key account management skills as they needed to work with their Managed Care teams to identify sources of funding, due to lack of a central funding body like PBS back then in the UK. When Backer returned to Australia to work with Schering-Plough hebrought elements of this model with him.
He is now at Merck Serono currently involved in reviewing the structure for MSLs, which means redefining both sales and MSL roles within the organization: “This is all about sales team and MSL teams working together and integrating well. To achieve this we need to ensure duties and responsibilities are clearly segregated.” He says “with highly complex products in the future pipeline it is important to have highly skilled teams to provide knowledge on these products, but it must be done in a compliant way.”
So just how can the industry getbetter at taking advantage of the opportunities offered by integrating the sales force with MSLs? Backer doesn’t see that there is an industry uniform way of achieving this, but believes that the challenge lies in compliance. “When the model first emerged, some companies had Medical Managers as part of the commercial team. The industry learned at a very early stage this might create a potential conflict of interest and adapted accordingly. Nowadays most companies have rigorous compliance systems that ensure segregation of duties and MSLs operate under the governance of the Medical Department.”
He sees that thepharmaindustry could certainly benefit from having some uniform compliance and guidance on this topic. “We have a responsibility to do this in the right way. The broader public doesn’t have a good understanding of MSLs, or sometimes the complexity of the highly specialised drugs, and as an industry we have a responsibility to deliver the right clinical information through scientific discussions and medical education.” Backer is very supportive of this concept and considers that if the industry can get this right and support the need for more medical education; ultimately it will be to the benefit of patients.