A three-part interview with Lisa Adler, Vice President, Corporate Communications,

Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company

When I asked Lisa about life following the acquisition, she told me: “We had to walk a fine line rebranding ourselves as Millennium: The Takeda Oncology Company.  Suddenly, we were only oncology.  We needed a new vision and mission and we needed to engage staff on our new deliverables.  Rebranding was an incredible experience, especially doing it while we were just getting to know our new parents.”

“Our tone with Takeda was and is ‘We respect your culture and our Takeda colleagues, while retaining our own.’  We solicited input on the rebranding efforts from nearly one third of our employees via focus groups and one-on-one interviews.  We also set up a Best Company Task Force composed of the go-to people across Millennium.  We shared all of the new branding materials with them in advance to get their perspectives and ensure their buy-in.”

The new mission statement for Millennium is bold: ‘We aspire to cure cancer.’  How did that come about?  “We found a lot of dissatisfaction with the more typical vision of “making cancer a chronic disease”  and we wanted to differentiate ourselves. Our passion is to cure cancer, not just treat it. We tested this concept extensively because we wanted to ensure id did not offend patient and healthcare professional groups.  Instead, they told us they loved it because it showed that we were putting our stake in the sand.”

“During our research, we found a story about a girl from Hiroshima with leukemia whose family and friends folded 1,000 origami cranes with the intent of helping her recover.  We learned that it is a Japanese tradition to fold 1,000 cranes for health and longevity. In Japan, this is often done at weddings and for sick friends.  We turned this into a company-wide and then external opportunity for people to share their wishes and to illustrate the impact of cancer and the importance of finding cures.”

“ At internal company meetings, at medical meetings and with patient advocacy groups, we collected the handwritten wishes of more than 1,000 people. A tribute to this effort can be seen in our lobby where we have 1,000 cranes, cast in aluminium, suspended from the ceiling, each with a handwritten note.”

“All I can say is thank goodness we discovered that our neighbor, MIT, has an origami club, because there are 52 steps to folding each crane.  We’re still on the learning curve… We’ve had patients, celebrities, politicians and families write out their wishes for good health and a cure for cancer. Takeda loved the idea and adapted it. They even use it in their advertising in Japan.” Check out www.1000cranesofhope.com.”

“Now it is two years post-acquisition and the transformation of Millennium has been a truly exciting and rewarding experience. Our recent employee engagement survey, confirmed that we have accomplished our goal of maintaining our culture of innovation, collaboration and passion. Culture is the #1 reason our employees work at the company. Now the challenge is to remain vigilant about employee engagement and focus on our number one priority – delivering novel science that leads to a cure.”

“Twitter, Twitter Little Stars” in Bloomberg Businessweek, by Felix Gillette — as customers make or break brands online, companies rush to hire social media directors….and figure out what they do

“On Language, the Web is at War with Itself” on NPR, by Linton Weeks

To be fair, Research and Development management is right to be cautious about how they reach out to reporters. The list of what they cannot talk about is long. And, when they can talk, they must keep in mind the regulations around pre-approval promotion.  PR firms that know their way through the ever increasing restrictions around product promotion and new product launches, are often unfamiliar with pipeline communication regulations.

In media interview training, I advise researchers to find analogies for their work to make it easier to understand. I use the same approach to explain the importance of storytelling to researchers. This is almost always a tough sell. To be effective a researcher must base his or her opinion on data.  Not on emotion or wishful thinking.  Storytelling can look  frivolous, at best, at worst like pandering.

Here is the analogy I use to explain the role of storytelling to researchers.  If it looks helpful to you, feel free to use it and please share here how you would improve or expand on it.

Authentic, compelling personal stories may not be as hard to discover as a new therapy, but they take research.

Unless your message is extraordinarily powerful (ex: you’ve created the first synthetic cell or you’ve cured cancer), you will want to enhance it with an adjuvant to make it more effective.  In media outreach, personal stories are your adjuvants.  Without them, your therapy/message may bounce off the receptor/reporter or not stay long enough to be effective.  With them, your therapy locks onto the receptor/reporter, shaping the article and more effectively gaining the attention of your audience.

Here is an example of an adjuvant  from Merck  used recently in “The Scientist:”

The Scientist –

Late at night, a feverish young girl shuffled into her father’s room complaining of a sore throat, Maurice Hilleman examined the swollen bumps on his daughter’s neck. It was 1963. She had the mumps, a common childhood disease at the time, caused by a virus that inflames the salivary glands. Most cases are mild, but severe infections can induce swelling of the brain or spinal cord and permanent deafness.

Quickly, Hilleman took several swabs of 5-year-old Jeryl Lynn’s throat, immersed the cotton tips in beef broth, and raced to his laboratory at Merck & Co. to put the container in the freezer. Within 4 years, Hilleman would turn his daughter’s strain of the mumps into the first-ever live vaccine for the infection, still used today in Merck’s Measles-Mumps-Rubella (MMR) vaccine.

What has worked for you to transform reluctant researchers into advocates for media outreach?

Because those of you working in pharma and biotech are, understandably, sensitive to what may look like a ‘negativity rehash;” I want to say for the record that my intent is positive: to examine this topic in a public forum so that those of us who care (and know about RS Snapshot, so they can participate – please forward this to the best minds you know!) can find ways to constructively change the situation. Knee-jerk mistrust of the healthcare industry helps no one, patients least of all.  I’m not the only one who feels a sense of urgency about this.  Building trust doesn’t happen overnight and there is no time to waste.

Please let me know: What topics you would like to see covered in this series?

It seems to me that there is a win-win opportunity here for pharmaceutical and  biotech companies to collaborate with physician and patient advocacy organizations to develop smart phone apps that will help patients, and those of us who want to avoid becoming patients, make better daily choices in an integrated way.  Sending patients reminders to take their medicines is good, but wouldn’t a more comprehensive app that includes excercise, food choices, even healthy cooking tips, be better?  And, what if these more comprehensive apps were targeted for different patient demographics, i.e.; teens, parents, men, women, seniors?  And, what if the apps were fun?  What if they were games or contests, or simply let patients track and score points?

Do you know of apps, or similar programs, that are already out there and being used?  Do you have other thoughts on ways the industry can collaborate and create to improve compliance and overall health care outcomes?