On­col­o­gists would like a word with phar­ma com­pa­nies. More than a word, ac­tu­al­ly – they’d like en­tire in-depth con­ver­sa­tions with drug ex­perts and more re­al-world da­ta, please.

That’s ac­cord­ing to Ac­cen­ture’s new study look­ing at on­col­o­gists’ needs through a phar­ma lens. The study comes as FDA ap­proved 16 nov­el can­cer drugs in 2021 – in­clud­ing the first KRAS in­hibitor – along with more than 40 new in­di­ca­tions in on­col­o­gy and hema­tol­ogy. Mean­while, on­col­o­gy tri­als are at record lev­els, up 60% from just five years ago, Ac­cen­ture not­ed in its re­port.

Not sur­pris­ing then that on­col­o­gists – both at aca­d­e­m­ic med­ical cen­ters and in com­mu­ni­ty prac­tices – want sci­en­tif­ic ev­i­dence in­clud­ing spe­cif­ic pa­tient dis­cus­sions, one-on-one di­a­logues about prod­ucts and in­di­ca­tions and re­al-world da­ta and ev­i­dence.

Nine out of 10 on­col­o­gists said talk­ing to phar­ma com­pa­nies about pa­tients’ in­di­vid­ual cas­es will in­flu­ence fu­ture treat­ment de­ci­sions, ver­sus just 43% who said prod­uct dis­cus­sions would.

The take­away from Ac­cen­ture is that even as ground-break­ing can­cer drugs stream in­to the mar­ket, prod­uct push­es alone won’t win on­col­o­gists’ sup­port.

“When I start­ed work­ing as a phar­ma­cist in the in­dus­try 20 years ago, you were just grate­ful you had treat­ments for a col­lec­tive of pa­tients, say in breast can­cer,” An­dré Dahin­den, man­ag­ing di­rec­tor, glob­al pre­ci­sion on­col­o­gy in Ac­cen­ture’s life sci­ence prac­tice, said.

Now with ad­vanc­ing pre­ci­sion med­i­cine, he added, “phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies can’t just say ‘We have a drug for lung can­cer,’ they have to say, ‘We have a drug for lung can­cer where we have da­ta show­ing this in pa­tients with this char­ac­ter­is­tics, we have a dis­pro­por­tion­ate ben­e­fit.’ So it’s in­vert­ing the re­la­tion­ship from drugs just seek­ing pa­tients to pa­tients seek­ing the right drug.”

Re­al-world da­ta is in­creas­ing­ly im­por­tant in those dis­cus­sions, rank­ing in the top five ser­vices on­col­o­gists want from phar­ma. More than half (51%) said they ex­pect they’ll need more dis­cus­sions of re­al-world da­ta in the fu­ture, while 65% said phar­ma reps should be able to dis­cuss re­al-world da­ta and spe­cif­ic pa­tient sen­ti­ments about treat­ments.

“It’s much more so­phis­ti­cat­ed dis­cus­sion which re­quires ei­ther a high­ly qual­i­fied ex­pert com­pa­ny re­source or a com­pa­ny work­ing at arm’s length with an ecosys­tem of ex­perts, whether con­tract­ed or not, to help make sense of the re­la­tion­ship of prod­uct char­ac­ter­is­tics ver­sus pa­tient char­ac­ter­is­tics,” Dahin­den said.

As part of the study, Ac­cen­ture al­so asked on­col­o­gists how they pre­fer to get in­for­ma­tion. The pan­dem­ic pushed com­mu­ni­ca­tions to more dig­i­tal chan­nels and on­col­o­gists are OK with that, but they’d al­so still like to talk to phar­ma rep­re­sen­ta­tives in per­son. Al­though again, they spec­i­fied reps with sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge and da­ta.

Nine­ty per­cent of on­col­o­gists sur­veyed ranked per­son­al con­ver­sa­tions whether in-per­son and vir­tu­al as their pre­ferred way to re­ceive in­for­ma­tion from phar­ma com­pa­nies. Face-to-face and vir­tu­al are both im­por­tant de­pen­dent on the con­text, Dahin­den said.

His ad­vice to phar­ma com­pa­nies is no mat­ter how they plan to de­liv­er in­for­ma­tion, they should be work­ing on get­ting up to speed on the sci­ence.

“If you’re not flu­ent in re­al-world ev­i­dence da­ta gen­er­a­tion and dis­cussing and us­ing it, it’s ur­gent to do so. Now. It’s very hard to imag­ine in pre­ci­sion med­i­cine not be­ing qual­i­fied to talk about all the prop­er­ties of what your med­i­cine can do in re­al life,” he said.

As concerns related to uptake and distribution continue to linger, Switzerland is among the first countries that plans to destroy hundreds of thousands of expired and unused Covid-19 vaccine doses.

The European country said it plans to destroy more than 600,000 doses of Moderna’s Spikevax Covid-19 vaccine as the doses have reached their expiration date.

However, Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland that he’s in the process of throwing 30 million doses in the garbage, exclaiming, “We have a big demand problem.”

More than 500 stakeholders sent comments to the FTC on whether the commission should look further into pharma middlemen, known as PBMs, with many of the commenters calling for more federal oversight.

Similar to the critical open comment period in a deadlocked FTC session last February, pharmacies and pharmacy groups are continuing to call out the lack of transparency among the top 3 PBMs, which control about 80% of the market.

HHS on Thursday finalized its decision to withdraw a rule, proposed just before former President Donald Trump left office, that would’ve caused thousands of HHS and FDA regulations to automatically expire if they weren’t reviewed within two years, and every 10 years thereafter.

The decision follows the filing of a lawsuit last March, in which several nonprofits alleged that the outgoing administration planted “a ticking timebomb” for HHS, essentially forcing it to devote an enormous amount of resources to the unprecedented and infeasible task of reviewing thousands of regulations regularly.

At the end of January, the European Medicines Agency officially launched its new clinical trials info system (CTIS), although the migration to the new platform has only really just begun, and sponsors have until the end of January 2023 before all initial trial applications must be submitted through CTIS.

Overall, 56 clinical trial applications have been submitted in CTIS during the first 3 months since the launch of the system on Jan. 31, according to new data posted by the EMA. By comparison, about 4,000 new trials are authorized each year across Europe.