Eureka Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company located in the San Francisco Bay Area, focused on breakthrough immunotherapies for the treatment of cancer. Eureka has three ongoing clinical trials evaluating the safety and effectiveness of their novel T-cell-based therapies for the treatment of liver cancer and is actively recruiting patients. However, since liver cancer is a rare disease, it can often be difficult to find patients eligible for their study.
To address this, Dr. Pei Wang, VP of Clinical Development at Eureka, had an idea: what if there was a way to identify and connect with doctors who specialize in the liver cancer field, to spread awareness about Eureka’s clinical trials?
Since we are an expert in the data mining of scientific publications, Pei reached out to us. Essentially, by leveraging our technology, we can identify medical doctors who have published in the field of liver cancer. All publications require some form of contact information for the primary investigator (PI), in the event that readers have questions, comments or concerns they wish to discuss with the author. Thus, we formulated a plan to source, filter and organize this information so that we can generate a list of potential PIs that Eureka could contact.
In order to accomplish this, we first needed to find a list of doctors and their contact information (email address) in the field of “hepatocellular carcinoma” (liver cancer). Furthermore, these doctors need to be in hospitals or cancer centers in U.S., since Eureka is performing U.S. clinical trials. To achieve this, we used the keyword "hepatocellular carcinoma" AND (cancer center[Affiliation] OR hospital[Affiliation]) to search scientific publications and extract the authors’ info into an Excel sheet. This resulted in approximately 750 doctors that fit the specified criteria. A sample of the data is shown below:
The next step was for Eureka to draft an email message. Since many hospitals limit what type of information can be shared on their servers, the email did not include any fancy graphic designs or attachments:
Finally, we helped Eureka to send the email messages to the list we obtained in the first step.
The campaign went well: the open rate was ~23%, and the click rate was 5%. What’s more exciting is that Eureka received positive replies from 5 doctors in two days. These doctors have helped increase awareness of Eureka’s clinical trials and expedite collaboration between Eureka and their institutions, which would increase patient recruitment for clinical trials. Additionally, the communication with these doctors helped Eureka to gain more insight from the physician community.
Do you also need to reach out to doctors? Please don’t hesitate to contact us.