With its newly launched predictive analytics platform, Real Chemistry is hoping to “shine a light” on the GLP-1 agonist market and help pharma and biotech teams prepare for future market moves “with the speed and agility they need,” according to the healthcare agency’s Rita Glaze-Rowe.
Real Chemistry debuted the IRIS platform Tuesday. Subscribers to the service will be able to access artificial-intelligence-driven analyses of the GLP-1 drug category, updated weekly and arranged in a real-time dashboard view.
IRIS arrives as the pharma industry makes a long-awaited shift to focus on tackling obesity, “the most relatable condition on the planet,” as Glaze-Rowe, president of Real Chemistry’s newly created transformative healthcare markets department, termed it in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
“There’s not one of us that hasn’t been counseled about our weight or felt pressure about our weight or wanted to do something that really improves our health from that perspective,” she said. “And so, for us, it’s really thinking about how we harness the power of that and put this in the right frame.”
The “billions of data points” fueling the platform’s analytics start with real-world claims data, which “sets our foundation,” according to Glaze-Rowe. From there, massive collections of other information—including social media activity, state and federal legislation, clinical trial results and other scientific literature and both paid advertising and earned media coverage of GLP-1s—are layered in as well to create “more of a full-dimensional picture of what’s happening,” she said.
Real Chemistry is aiming to reach teams at biotech and pharma companies that are “cross-functional in nature,” she said, spanning medical affairs, market access, communications, market research and beyond. The platform will specifically help those teams—and especially those who may not have the time or resources to analyze the market themselves—dig into the “transformative impacts” that GLP-1s could have not only on their current indications of obesity and Type 2 diabetes, but also on future targets for the drugs and on the healthcare industry as a whole.
The IRIS platform will also churn out regular reports on the GLP-1 segment, the first of which debuted alongside the service’s launch.
According to Glaze-Rowe, the “starkest contrast” between GLP-1s and other drug categories, as detailed in the report, lies in how the growing phenomenon of “GLP-1 influencers” are making the segment look more like something out of the consumer lifestyle industry than typical healthcare marketing.
“Normally, when you have voices that are consumer voices or patient voices in this social context, they’re really focused on their condition—describing their condition, living with their condition,” she said. “We’ve now seen influencers who are literally using GLP-1s as a way to categorize themselves. In this market, the way they’re building followership, the way they’re monetizing that followership and the way that they’re driving content around that—they’re doing it from a therapeutic class perspective, which we have not seen.”
As the report notes, while typical condition-focused healthcare influencers have niche online followings in the “hundreds to low thousands,” with minimal opportunities for monetization, many GLP-1 influencers have follower counts in the hundreds of thousands, with millions of “likes” and, in some cases, enough paid content opportunities to make a living.
In addition to sharing their own experiences with the drugs, many of these influencers also offer tips that may send other patients off traditional healthcare pathways—by recommending telehealth providers who will prescribe GLP-1s, providing advice for navigating drug shortages and insurance coverage, guiding others through dose adjustments and side effect mitigation and recommending diet changes to support treatment.
That shift represents both good and bad for pharma companies and their brand managers, Glaze-Rowe said. On the one hand, “it creates opportunities for organizations to truly look at [patient] experience from a new lens,” she said, suggesting that this framework could one day stretch to how pharmas operate in other major drug categories like oncology, immunology or neurology. On the other, however, comms teams may find it challenging to switch up how they typically reach and respond to their audiences, especially as GLP-1 influencers increasingly overtake doctors as the most authoritative voices for interested patients.
That power split is “a little lopsided compared to what we would normally see in a healthcare market” and is indicative of how the overall GLP-1 market is putting pressure on already fragile cracks in the U.S. healthcare system, Glaze-Rowe said. She suggested that the shifts can be traced back to the “pent-up demand that existed in this marketplace, and also just the depth of obesity from an emotional, physical, psychological, cultural, societal perspective,” noting that it’ll be crucial for IRIS to track how GLP-1s continue to disrupt the broader healthcare industry.
Elsewhere in the report, IRIS’ data show that while the proportion of those in the U.S. diagnosed with obesity who have been prescribed a GLP-1 has skyrocketed nearly 72% in the last year, it stands at just 3.5% of the more than 52 million total.
Glaze-Rowe pointed to that as another potentially surprising finding in the report—the comparison of GLP-1s' cultural ubiquity to their actual market penetration.
“If we’re already seeing these kinds of phenomena happen, the notion for us is what happens when that reaches a 5% or a 10% or a 15%?” she said. “We all know that there are broad-ranging economic considerations where that’s concerned as well, which is another area that we’re going to be diving into in the coming months.”
Finally, she also highlighted the platform’s calculation that there are more than 100 GLP-1 agonist clinical trials currently underway, spanning more than 60 disease states.
“We’re looking at this becoming a very competitive market over the next five to 10 years,” she said. “From a mechanistic perspective, this is going to have a long-lasting impact across healthcare in a number of different categories that we either haven’t been able to tackle clinically or have studied for a long time and haven’t really been able to make any progress in.”