Survey trivia: the biotech-pharma dichotomy and GM food on steroids!
I was at the BIO media brunch earlier today to hear the results of two polls, one an internet survey of 252 US biotech executives and another a telephone survey of 800 registered US voters conducted between April 17 to April 19 by Public Opinion Strategies and Peter D. Hart Research Associates. The conclusions weren't exactly earth shattering.
By and large, the data confirmed what we already know: drugs and therapies for unmet needs are highly valued by the public; transgenic foods are not. Industry execs cited regulations and government intervention as their biggest bugbears. Funnily enough, very few of the biotech executives surveyed were at all keen to see the FDA develop a framework for follow-on biologics like that in Europe. No surprise there then!
And of course, everybody is very excited about the potential for biotech to create a country that is self-sufficient in terms of energy generation and "independent of foreign oil." According to the PR blurb, industry leaders and voters "share high levels of optimisim about the potential for finding cures, developing clean technologies to reduce pollution and creating 'green drug factories.'"
With regard to transgenic food, one key difference highlighted was the much more negative attitude of the women surveyed to GM products than men (34% of men found them troubling compared with 52% of women). Apart from the fact that one wonders whether these women knew that they've been consuming GM food for ~10 years now, this may be an important finding; in my household at least, it's the wife who makes the food shopping decisions!
My first thought is perhaps this could be turned into a marketing opportunity: GM food targeted to the female consumer? All we need to do is engineer Bt corn with a set of enzymes that produce the male pheromones androstenol or androstenone. I can see the headlines now: WOMEN BRAINWASHED IN CONSPIRACY TO PEDDLE FRANKENFOOD!
Coming back to reality, after the survey presentation, BIO president Jim Greenwood and several biotech executives -- Biogen's James Mullen, Josh Boger of Vertex, Richard Hamilton of Ceres and Stephen Sherwin of Cell Genesys among them -- fielded questions from the media.
The key question that I wanted to ask was preempted by a journalist from Steve Burrill's new magazine, The Journal of Life Sciences. He asked whether the panel had any idea whether the public differentiated the biotech sector from the pharma industry.
The answer from the pollsters was no, although they pointed out that respondents were much more positive about biotech after they had been further informed that biotech companies "use biological processes and technology to develop medicines and cures for hard to treat debilitating diseases" (86% gave a favorable rating compared to 41% beforehand). But I don't think the panel spent nearly enough time on this.
To me at least, PR differentiating pharma from biotech should be a key issue for BIO and the industry going forward. We all know that the differences between R&D in biotech and pharma are becoming blurred, but given the PR mire the pharma industry now finds itself in post-Vioxx, there's a real opportunity here for BIO to get the message out to the public that biotech firms have a much better track record of targeting treatments for unmet needs and bringing new discoveries out of academia and to the market. While we may assume that the public understands the difference between biotech and pharma companies, they don't. So BIO should be making a concerted effort to differentiate themselves and their companies from pharma in general.
Comments
It's definitely a great marketing opportunity, but if a biotech company is lucky, not for ever. Once the small, penniless company makes it big, just watch it take on predictable corporate habits!
Posted by: Melanie Brazil | May 6, 2007 09:12 PM
Nothing wrong with companies making money, selling products and becoming profitable of course; I just see this as a public relations opportunity. In terms of the public eye, big biotech companies have much more to gain from an association with small and innovative biotech rather than big pharma. That is why BIO should do more to differentiate itself from PhRMA and its member companies. After all, this is PR, not reality!
Posted by: Andrew Marshall | May 7, 2007 03:16 PM