Megan Prock McGrath, Managing Director of MacDougall Advisors, shares what to keep in mind when communicating with investors and consumers. Megan discusses the importance of setting milestones in advance and following through with them. Megan also talks about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in the biotech space.

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TRANSCRIPT:

DOUG: What are the areas where investor messaging and consumer messaging are similar?

MEGAN: Any message has to be tailored. So, the first thing you need to do is understand your audience. So, I like to run through the questions of what is keeping them up at night, what are their concerns, what are their goals? And when you think about those for each group, you’re going to have different answers and then you’re going to create different messages for each.

DOUG: And so, what are some of the differences in messaging between, say let’s start with the investor messaging. What are some things to consider there? And then we’ll look at the consumer messaging side.

MEGAN: Investors, they’re probably wondering what your market potential is. Is it is your product going to be something that can be offered in the EU and the United States? They’re going to want to understand the scientific underpinnings of your approach. Many of the investors in my space, biotech, are quite sophisticated. Some of them even have PhDs. So, they want to know what’s differentiating your product from another. They want to understand the mechanisms of action and understand how your approach is differentiated in the body and what that means for consumers. Um, they might want to know how conversations are going with the FDA and the regulatory bodies that you’re working with. So, thinking through each of those different areas and listening to them when you’re having conversations with them, what are the questions that keep coming up? That means you’re maybe not hitting quite as well on that message as you thought you might be. And think about that, hone it, and update it over time.

DOUG: We know in a lot of this space is sort of the walls between business, consumer, in-house communication and broken down because all the information sort of gets out there. When it comes to the biotech space that you’re talking about, while you’re communicating with investors, what type of messages are you trying to communicate with consumers at different stages?

MEGAN: We’ll have patients that will reach out. They’ll have watched an eight-hour scientific symposium with presentation after presentation from PhDs that might be geared towards investors or towards the scientific community, and they’ll have questions about, can I enroll in this clinical trial? When will it be available? And so even if you’re messaging specifically to investors, you have to be, or the scientific community, you have to be very careful with understanding that today’s consumers and patients are very savvy and they’re going to be out there, particularly in the rare disease community looking for this information. So, it’s important to have a lot of those questions sorted out early, which is what is your compassionate use policy? What happens if somebody doesn’t qualify for your clinical trial? Is there a way for them to get into it? Where can you send them if they have questions? What are the patient advocacy groups that you can connect them with that can help get them resources if that’s not something that you’re set up to do? And so, thinking through all of that and each time taking a lens and having perhaps a good patient advocacy person on your staff who’s connected to those communities who can help vet some of your messages and help you think through, how is this going to resonate with the patients who are really anxiously awaiting treatments?

DOUG: So, for a lot of companies in the biotech space, it might take years before this a transaction that they might not be actively engaged, but should they be planning for transition? And what are some of the best practices to do that?

MEGAN: The minute you start planning your calendar, that’s when you start coming up with your messages accordingly. Because our horizon in biotech is so long, it takes so long to bring a drug to market. You have so many preclinical trials that people don’t necessarily realize that you’re putting together your data packages to send to the FDA to make your case for even being able to start human trials. And then your clinical trial horizon is also quite long. And then there’s the approval process. So, as you’re thinking about, though, all of those milestones are laid out years in advance and you have to be aware that the messages you’re communicating today will be driven by what’s happening in the future. And so, if you’re communicating a milestone, even if you’re a private company, you have to remember that that’s searchable. It’s out there. And if that timeline moves, you’re going to have to answer for that. So, I often recommend that people, one are very thoughtful about how early they communicate those milestones, but two, also, as they’re coming up with their messaging, are thinking two, three, four years in the future and looking at their competitors and their clinical trials and their timelines and thinking about how that impacts them as well, because all of that comes together to make one picture for what your message should be.

DOUG: If you are communicating with the FDA, can that also become public depending on what’s going on in the process? And I assume you can’t necessarily pick and choose what and when you communicate with the FDA as you’re moving along the process.

MEGAN: A lot of FDA communications are somewhat confidential when it comes to some of the data packages and the letters and back and forth. Now, if you’re a public company, you have certain disclosure guidelines that you have to still stick within based on the information you’re receiving from the FDA. But you don’t necessarily, when you initiate a trial, that’s very public information, you’re going to talk about when your first patient is being dosed, you’re going to talk about when you expect to have the data from that. Um, but maybe you don’t say when your second trial is going to start or when that ends until you’re at that point, it’s nice to give yourself a little bit of wiggle room for things. Covid was a really good illustrative point for why you have to be able to have a little bit of flex. When we got into supply chain issues, when borders closed, that really impacted a lot of clinical trials that were happening, and it was hard to get patients in for clinical trials when everyone was locked down. So, there are these events and not all as big as Covid, but there are things that happen that are always going to impact those timelines. So, every time you’re communicating a milestone to the public, it’s imperative that you just think through, is this a is this a reasonable goal, and what are the scenarios that might impact us reaching that? And how do we message accordingly if that happens?

DOUG: Covid was such a catalyst for consumers consuming medical information. Have brands set themselves apart? How do you strategically handle that?

MEGAN: Our industry did this amazing thing which was bringing these vaccines in early record time, which I just think most of the general public to this day doesn’t understand how incredibly quickly those were delivered. You know, often a drug coming to market is at least five years. Um, and those were delivered so rapidly and there was so much investment and interest in the community during that time that there it was really unprecedented for us to have so many eyes on the work we were doing. And it was really interesting for me as a professional in this industry to, to be talking to people and friends and have them all of a sudden for the first time, starting to understand some of the lingo that I have been sort of bathing in for so many years. And I think it did raise the public consciousness a lot. And so, it also taught consumers to be a little bit more savvy and patient advocacy groups, I feel like we’re able to gain some more traction. And I think it’s net positive. The industry, we only exist to help patients. And so, um, it maybe made us a little bit more conscious of, of, um, messaging to those audiences. But it’s been a good thing overall for us.

DOUG: You talked about the incredible innovation in the biotech space during the onset of Covid bringing the vaccine to market, obviously, is the economic climate has changed, cost of capital has gone up. It’s been more challenging for a number of biotech companies. What’s your advice for those who still have a firm belief that their product can have a payoff, but it’s becoming a little more challenging to keep it going?

MEGAN: The cost of capital it’s really hard to raise. We’re seeing the time between fundraises is just really elongating. And unfortunately, a lot of companies have had to reduce their pipeline or, um, have reductions in force and, and really hone in on the treatments and the approaches that that are the most advanced or offer the most promise at this time. And I think one of the things that you can really do to stand out is really hone in on that key differentiator. Make sure that you’re able to articulate what sets you apart, what makes you more innovative, have better quality, um, and what makes your offering something that is worth investing in? Number one. Number two, I think as you’re communicating to those milestones, it’s important that you hit your milestones and that you understand when you’re communicating around those, that those are very important value creation and inflection points. So those milestones, if you have a data readout, make sure that your investors and potential partners have a seat at the table. They’re asking questions, they understand and you’re getting the feedback from them. And you’re tailoring your messaging messaging accordingly. And ideally using that as a chance to generate a. little bit more interest. The final thing I would say is, you know, what goes down will come back up. It always does. And companies who are using this time to really think through what their future looks like, and being very clear about those milestones are going to be the ones that come out ahead when things start to swing back around and funders are starting to look to reinvest, there are going to be companies that have used this time to lay the groundwork to really be successful.

DOUG: I’m actually hearing and sort of interesting that even though you’re in advisory, there seems to be a lot of overlap with public relations and communications work. Can you maybe share a little bit of where it’s the same and where it’s different? Maybe give me a little bit on where it’s the same and we’ll take that as a question first. Then we can find out where your role and responsibility is different.

MEGAN: Yeah. So, I like to think of my role as an adviser obviously to my clients. But I, I do corporate communications, I do public relations. We help them think through any of the audiences that they’re reaching really. And it can be B2B, it can be B2C, it can be investors. And there are all of these different audiences in early-stage biotechs that, um, some of them were not even really thinking about consumers, aside from the patient advocacy groups, because the horizon is so long before they reach those consumers.

So, I think anybody in this industry at this stage now, if you’re, you know, in a commercial company that’s quite different, but at this stage. There’s really, you’re touching a lot of different things. You’re helping think through, if this is our messaging, how do we want to communicate that on the website to patients? What does that look like? One of the things I like to remind people is that once you set your brand and you set your tone and you talk about the way you communicate with your patients and all of your audiences, it should be on your 404 page when they do a search, and something doesn’t come up that should. That’s an opportunity to reinforce your key messages. There are so many places that you can think about that and reinforce that brand across. So, my work very much is related to media. It’s related to corporate communications. Sometimes it’s internal communications, sometimes it’s helping think through the internal brand and what that means for employees. Sometimes it’s social media and sometimes it’s investor decks. It’s all relevant at that stage.

DOUG: Yeah. And would you say what differentiates it is maybe a heavier emphasis on both investor relations and maybe even identifying potential partners and buyers? Is that sort of where it’s a bit different?

MEGAN: The early stage, biotechs don’t make money. There’s no there’s no revenue generation. So, investors are a very important audience for early-stage biotechs because that’s how most of them are funded. So that it’s investors or public markets. And even if it’s public markets, you’re thinking through your S-1, your initial public offering, what that looks like, and you’re still messaging to investors. They’re just a different type of investor than you would have. Whereas once you’re commercial stage, you have your revenue you’re generating, you have customers and patients and medical providers that you’re messaging to. Um, and so while we’re thinking about media and some of these other outlets, they often are a channel to reach potential investors and partners. Um, not so much for the general public.

DOUG: Yeah, that’s really fascinating. The distinction. It’s clear you’ve got a great mastery over this subject matter. Thanks so much for sharing your ideas with us.

MEGAN: Thank you so much for having me. It was a pleasure to be here.