Rare disease drug treatments continue to be the focus of attention for drug developers, with the global market expected to grow from $ 161.4 billion in 2020 to over $ 547 billion in the beginning of the next decade. However, rare diseases are so rare that it can be difficult to sell medicines to treat them. 

Mass media campaigns to promote products related to a relatively small number of people  around the world are very inefficient, not to mention costly. Finding patients (and their doctors) who could benefit from a targeted message about  specialty treatment is like finding a proverbial needle in a haystack. 

A treasure trove of data that has become available in recent years, and technologies such as artificial intelligence can help, said Chris Paquette, CEO of Deep Intent, a marketing technology company founded by data scientists at the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. But he said rare disease drug marketers also need to think differently about how they use the data. 

“We need to market to what’s coming, rather than what’s been in the past,” he said. 

Typically, drug marketers have used data to find doctors who frequently prescribe a med and then reached out to them by sending a sales rep or, increasingly during the pandemic, by pushing more promotional content their way digitally. 

But DeepIntent and other tech marketing companies have been using AI to help rare disease drug companies reach doctors proactively, when they`re expected to see patients who might need their treatments. 

“We look at a provider’s schedule of appointments coming up with patients through different sets of data that we have access to, and then we marry that back to clinical data about those patients in a privacy safe way,” he said. While it’s clearly more difficult to get involved directly with patients, AI and data analysis can also help  marketers do that, Paquette said. The key is to “downdial” the technology’s machine learning capabilities so that ads can be targeted and delivered without violating HIPAA or invading patient privacy. 

Therefore, DeepIntent’s technology explains that instead of targeting ads to patients with certain rare diseases, it identifies groups with general demographics that are vulnerable to  the disease and  targets the ads to that audience. 

Paquette didn’t name a specific pharmaceutical partner, but  the company is working with 9 of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies” and a rare disease drug manufacturer has hereditary angioedema in potential patients. He said he helped guide him to the disease management app. 

“The idea here is that we want to educate patients as soon as they are diagnosed with the disease. If you don’t, you’ll miss your chance. ” It also helps patients with rare illnesses, many of whom go for years without a diagnosis or live without the hope of  effective treatment. 4,444 industry watchers told that they expect more pharmaceutical marketers to use AI to advertise to niche audiences this year. Another marketing technology company, Optimize RX, is also using AI to help patients find potential doctors to treat by using AI to find predictive patterns in their claims data.

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