SPEAKERS:
· Nina Maravic Martinko, Head of Medical Affairs, Adriatics & Portugal, Astellas Pharma
· Ezinneka Imoh, Global Lead, Scientific Communications & Medical Education, Rare Diseases, Chiesi Group
· Nishan Mathias, Regional Europe TA Medical Head, Sandoz
· Sabine Louet, CEO, SciencePOD (Moderator)
KEY TAKEAWAYS:
• Co-created advisory panels generate decision support tools addressing diagnostic delays
• Ecosystem MSLs targeting underrepresented regions close health equity gaps
• CME programs outrank digital formats as preferred medical education delivery method
• Specialized nurses fundamentally reshape patient-facing content through direct involvement
• Strategic insights from patient advocacy uncover overlooked disease burdens
When Pharma Content Misses the Mark
Pharma companies invest heavily in medical education materials, yet many healthcare professionals remain dissatisfied with what they receive. The disconnect stems from a fundamental misalignment: companies create content based on what they believe clinicians need, rather than co-developing solutions addressing actual practice gaps.
"I think the topic of co-creation is a really important one in medical affairs. That's partly because increasingly what we've noticed is that healthcare professionals do not always like what pharma companies are sharing with them," observed Sabine Louet at Pharma Customer Engagement Europe 2025. The solution requires shifting from content push to collaborative partnership, according to a panel of medical affairs leaders from Astellas, Chiesi, and Sandoz.
From Advisory Boards to Practice-Changing Tools
Leading medical affairs teams are transforming traditional advisory boards from validation forums into active co-creation workshops that yield tangible clinical deliverables. This approach brings together multidisciplinary stakeholders—not just physicians, but nurses, geneticists, and patient representatives—to map entire patient journeys and identify specific bottlenecks.
Ezinneka Imoh described how her team at Chiesi addressed diagnostic delays in rare diseases.
"My team and I created an HCP advisory panel. And that panel consisted of the top players or the top healthcare professionals that work in the space. With that collaboration we're able to come up with the decision support tool, a referral checklist for patients, as well as patient materials."
Nina Maravic Martinko emphasized the strategic value of including patients directly in these discussions. "We organize advisory board for inviting all specialists who are involved in patient pathway, including patient representative," she said. "And when we have patients in Ad board, we are not obliged to speak about treatments, so only patient pathway in disease awareness."
The deliverables from these co-creation initiatives extend beyond traditional slide decks. Nishan Mathias described a study revealing misalignment between physician assumptions and patient preferences regarding treatment intensification. "We took the same physicians and the patients from the same setup and we asked them similar questions about intensification and wanted to find out what each of them said," he noted. "And then we realized that there are some gaps on a physician level, but there are also some gaps at a patient level."
The insights enabled targeted educational interventions that equipped key opinion leaders to address both physician knowledge gaps and patient concerns simultaneously.
Beyond Tier-One KOLs
While pharma companies traditionally concentrate resources on academic medical centers and tier-one key opinion leaders, significant patient populations receive care from regional providers who lack access to the same educational resources. This geographic and expertise gap represents both a market access challenge and a health equity imperative.
Martinko discovered this first-hand when examining patient coverage in complex indications. "We realize for specifically very difficult indication that in main university centers we are not covering all patients that we should," she said. "And in again some kind of advisory board we invited second local regional hospital experts and learned that they really need to be trained and educated much more."
To address these gaps systematically, some companies are creating specialized field roles. Imoh described her experience training ecosystem medical science liaisons specifically deployed to underrepresented geographies. "At a previous company that I worked in, my role was to train the MSLs and those MSLs were called community or ecosystem MSLs," she explained. "And the role there was to tap into those underrepresented regions. So regions where there were no clinical trial sites or the closest one was two hours away."
Critically, this expansion beyond traditional KOL networks includes non-physician stakeholders who often have more patient contact than physicians themselves. Mathias highlighted the training gaps facing specialized nurses in the UK healthcare system. "In the UK, many times what happens is nurses start growing up the ladder and come to band seven and then they get a small specialization and they are involved in a specialty but they didn't get any specific training to reach there," he observed.
Companies addressing these training needs through master classes and peer-to-peer education programs report improved patient outcomes and broader appropriate prescribing patterns. This proves particularly critical for rare disease therapies and biosimilars seeking to expand beyond early adopter populations into community practice settings.
Understanding What Clinicians Actually Want
Despite pharma industry enthusiasm for innovative digital content formats, empirical evidence suggests clinicians maintain more traditional learning preferences. Imoh referenced compelling survey data challenging common assumptions about medical education delivery.
"I remember seeing a survey of about 100 HCPs across the globe and the question was, how do you prefer pharma companies to deliver medical education," she said. "And the highest was actually CME programs." This preference for structured continuing medical education over podcasts, digital modules, or other emerging formats underscores the importance of validating assumptions about target audience needs rather than pursuing format innovation for its own sake.
The disconnect between pharma assumptions and clinician realities extends beyond format to content relevance. When Sandoz developed a patient-facing website with physician input, the team initially overlooked a critical stakeholder.
"We were trying to build a website intended for patients and we spoke to a couple of physicians, we built a set of content," Mathias explained. "And then we suddenly said the maximum touch point in this rare disease were the nurses. So we brought a couple of nurses in and asked them to review it and they changed a lot of it."
The nurses' intimate understanding of patient concerns and communication styles led them to fundamentally reshape messaging that physicians had approved but that would have failed to resonate with the intended audience. This example illustrates why co-creation must extend beyond traditional stakeholders to include all those who influence patient understanding and behavior.
From Metrics to Meaning
Medical affairs organizations increasingly recognize the distinction between activity metrics and genuine strategic insights that inform positioning and resource allocation. However, operationalizing this distinction and capturing actionable intelligence remains challenging.
Martinko emphasized the importance of qualitative engagement over quantitative tracking. "I think that our interaction with external engagement is absolutely crucial to be able to lead the teams and to discuss with the team members how and when we should proceed," she said. "Those insights, we are collecting it during ad boards, consultancies or some prolonged qualitative insights."
The value of genuine insights becomes apparent when they reveal overlooked patient burdens that competitors have missed. Imoh provided a compelling example of how patient advocacy and MSL field intelligence uncovered a differentiation opportunity. "For me, an insight is a strategic and actionable communication or information that is guarded from data sources such as ad boards, medical information, MSL interactions, congresses and so on," she explained. "Launching a product where there were two competitors in the market already, there was a patient burden of mental health that was not really understood by physicians."
This mental health burden, invisible to competitors focused on systemic side effects, became the foundation for an unbranded campaign that resonated strongly within the patient community and created multiple medical communication opportunities.
Mathias noted an ongoing challenge in rare disease specialty succession planning. "We worked with the societies to say, so I work in a rare disease and one of the challenges in the rare disease is that there is a risk of younger physicians taking a particular sub-specialty or a super specialization," he observed. "So you're seeing a set of physicians who have been there, who have been stalwarts within that area, who are now starting to retire."
Addressing this through masterclass programs mixing senior experts with rising stars represents long-term strategic thinking beyond immediate commercial metrics.
The Evolution of Medical Affairs Partnerships
The session revealed a medical affairs function in transition—from content distributor to strategic partner, from tier-one KOL focus to ecosystem engagement, from assumptions about clinician needs to systematic co-creation. This evolution addresses fundamental challenges: healthcare professional dissatisfaction with pharma-generated materials, health equity gaps in underserved geographies, succession crises in specialized fields, and the need for differentiation in crowded therapeutic areas.
Questions remain about optimal models for balancing internal capabilities with external expertise. When asked about medical communications agencies, Louet observed market tensions.
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"Some companies have said publicly they want to get rid of their agencies altogether," she noted. "It doesn't mean that it's going to happen because we all know that that extra expertise of telling the story and how to shape the story is something that pharma doesn't always have in house."
As artificial intelligence tools promise to accelerate content generation, the distinction between process efficiency and creative storytelling becomes more critical. Companies that successfully navigate this evolution will likely maintain hybrid models—internal content factories for high-volume materials while retaining specialized expertise for strategic narrative development.
The most successful medical affairs organizations will be those that systematically engage diverse stakeholders, validate assumptions about audience needs, capture genuine strategic insights, and recognize that value creation extends far beyond the pill. The patient and provider journey encompasses diagnostic pathways, treatment intensification decisions, specialized nurse education, and mental health burdens that traditional metrics fail to capture.
Co-creation with healthcare professionals, patients, and underrepresented communities offers a pathway to relevance in an increasingly skeptical marketplace. The evidence from Astellas, Chiesi, and Sandoz demonstrates that this approach delivers measurable improvements in patient outcomes, health equity, and competitive differentiation when executed with genuine commitment to partnership rather than content distribution.
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