Industrial Experience in MSD: Day 9

One World Hotel, Bandar Utama. Well we thought we will be using the huge ballrooms, but its actually at the lower ground floor where the small functions room are. Anyway, when we arrived, food was waiting for us.

Mr Sunny, the Business Unit Director, introduced us to the sales department who attended the meeting from the whole Malaysia under the same franchise. Today is actually the last day of a 4-day cycle meeting to update the product specialists on recent findings and new company strategies.

So it started off with assessment of product knowledge for the product specialists. They need to sit for exams just like us! There are true/false section, short-answer questions, and if you fail you have to resit the same paper, which is slightly better than us. After that, the speaker list out the agenda for the day. This, although is abit boring, but is important for the product specialists to mentally prepare themselves should any enquiries arises.

Then, the data of the sales volume from different companies on the same market were presented, showing areas where the department needs to improve on. It gives a good overview of where the company's sales are at the moment. This then leads to the briefing on marketing strategies for the next quarter of the year. A rough action plan is listed for the participants to ponder on. There is a check and balance exercise whereby the participants try to incorporate the action plan into their daily roles. If there are no good enough ideas, probably the marketing department need to revise the action plan.

Basically, the action plan hovers over 3 main areas, one of them being brand defending. As the pharma industry is flooded with generics, it is important for leading brands to stand out from the rest, hence the product specialist have to defend their brand in the market. For example, Cozaar XQ, a newly-registered Angiotensin-II antagonist (AIIA) + Calcium Channel blocker (CCB), currently do not have any direct generics competitors, but as many other companies try to penetrate this market, that's where brand defending comes into place. Btw, XQ means extra (X) blood pressure lowering due to the combination of the two drugs AIIA + CCB (compared to the common monotherapy of AIIA only or CCB only) and Q is for quality of the MSD product.

There was also another assessment just before lunch, to let the participants revise on what they have learned in the morning. So sometimes you don't even have time to study! Paying attention is a must at these conferences.

Then, it is lunchtime. We were lucky today. It's Japanese lunch day! We ate at a Japanese restaurant called Kora Restaurant, also in the same hotel. Pretty good reward for a tiring morning!

Saba fish set! Oiishii!!!

Next, while everyone was all filled up from Saba fish and nice Ocha, its time to fill up the brains! Mei Wen from the Medical Affairs department, who also conducted an IPEP session with us last week, updated the participants on the recent changes in the hypertension treatment guidelines. These include areas like systolic blood pressure for different patient age groups, or patients with complications such as diabetes etc. The medical affairs associates use credible sources such as the European Society of Hypertension (ESH).

Then, another medical advisor, Dr. Wendy, gave a review on clinical papers relevant to the training. She also shared about the general tips when dissecting a clinical paper, using the abbreviation PICO. PICO stands for :-

- POPULATION - Population of patient involved in the study, where they come from, how old etc.
- INTERVENTION - What kind of conditions set for the subjects, general methodology of the study.
- COMPARATOR - Most studies deal with comparing the profiles of different drugs with a reference drug.
- OUTCOME - The interpretation of trial results, and what conclusion can you draw from them.

She also clarified the difference between retrospective and prospective clinical studies. Retrospective means the study is looking into previous recorded data from clinics, hospitals, pharmacies etc. It is carried out as it only involves the compilation and analysis of recorded data, and also can accommodate a higher number of subjects. However, it is generally more biased as the conditions for selecting the subjects are not totally standardized. Even if you filter out subjects based on certain criteria, there are still uncertainty on whether all of the subjects' backgrounds are similar at all.

Prospective studies, the ones we normally see, deals with the set up of a trial, with pre-planning, standardized conditions etc. This method is generally more reliable as the data collected are under uniform conditions throughout the study. It is an active form of collecting clinical data compared to the retrospective studies, which are passive in nature.

Tea break!

Later in the afternoon, there was a workshop as part of marketing training. As the pharmaceutical industry is bounded by many codes and ethics, it is hard to fully utilize creativity in advertising and marketing of products. In this workshop, the participants get to be more liberal to think out of the box. A fun way to end the day!