How a top 10 pharma company tracks drug innovations and more with Feedly – Feedly Blog
Curating relevant content for newsletters to inform recipients across the company
Spending less than 1 hour daily on Feedly to select relevant insights
Discovering and organizing open-source biopharma news in one place
This Feedly for Biopharma client has graciously allowed us to share their story on the condition of anonymity. Client names have been changed.
THE CHALLENGE
Discovering and organizing open-source biopharma research in one place
Sienna is a Knowledge and Insights Advisor at a top 10 pharmaceutical company in Australia. Sienna and her team are responsible for two main tasks: responding to specific, timely questions from doctors or researchers across the company, and proactively keeping employees up-to-date on industry developments or innovations.
Responding to specific, timely questions
Doctors and researchers might ask Sienna’s team whether a particular drug was ever linked to an adverse event, like “Has amoxycillin ever caused encephalitis?” Or they might answer questions about new drug delivery platforms, like “How do you get our large molecule drug inside the cell so that it can actually get to the target, where it will do the work of curing the disease?” For questions like these, Sienna and her team seek information to compile resource lists or reports.
Sending out regular briefings to keep everyone informed
The second part of the job is proactively keeping people across the company up to date on drug developments, political decisions, and any other industry developments or innovations. Sienna and her team send out 50 different newsletters about relevant biopharma news every week to 765 recipients, plus a daily COVID newsletter: “We try to keep people informed of the most interesting published research in their areas.”
Struggling to gather intelligence on broad topics
For certain queries, Sienna and her team get their information from published literature in research journals, like PubMed. However, Sienna remembers how tricky things got when her team started getting requests for information about broader topics like drug innovations, regulatory decisions, political decisions, or industry updates. “Rather than being about a specific disease, we started getting asked about things like drug pricing, or the gene and cell therapy industry.” Sienna commented that it wasn’t easy to capture this type of news about “those more general areas where there is news, rather than just published literature.”
She set up some Google Alerts, and subscribed to emails from assorted websites, but it was messy. And if members of the team weren’t already experts in an area (like bioprocessing, for example), Sienna found it hard to know which sources to look at for relevant research.
Sienna and her team needed a way to track dozens of different topics and trends in biopharma at the same time from a large range of sources.
“Before using Feedly, we didn’t really know how to find ongoing news on these broader topics like drug pricing or the gene and cell therapy industry.”
THE SOLUTION
Using AI to track industry updates, innovations, and regulatory news
Back in 2013, Sienna knew she needed an RSS reader replacement to gather industry updates. At the time, she was using a free, personal Feedly account to read comics in her spare time, and quickly realized she could use the same tool to keep up with the biopharma industry.
“I truly believe in the power of RSS. It makes Feedly a powerful one-stop shop for all our favorite web pages.”
Leo, Feedly’s AI research assistant, reads through a pre-curated list of 3,000 top-tier biopharma publications: research journals, industry updates, regulatory news, PubMed, etc and surfaces content on the specific topics Sienna has selected.
Now, Sienna and her team use Feedly for Biopharma plus the power of AI to track and gather information across the topics they need.
Tracking molecules, drugs, and clinical trials with Leo Web Alerts
Finding relevant insights about a specific molecule or drug used to be like finding a needle in a haystack. But with Leo, Sienna can now easily discover hyper-specific information about the drugs and clinical trials they need to keep up with.
To replace noisy Google Alerts, Sienna created Leo Web Alerts in Feedly, which allow her to track anything across the web (not just in sources she follows in Feedly), like specific genes, molecules, diseases, or clinical trials. Instead of skimming multiple email updates per day like she had to with Google Alerts, Sienna can refine her Leo Web Alerts for her specific needs and see results in a single Feed.
For example, Sienna created a Leo Web Alert for bioprocessing, a topic she was unfamiliar with. By asking Leo to find articles about bioprocessing across the web, she didn’t need to know what the best sources of information were, but she could still get relevant insights about the topic. And as she continues to familiarize herself with the topic, she’s able to refine her bioprocessing Web Alert to get even better results.
“Web Alerts in Feedly allow me to be a lot more efficient than with Google Alerts. They’re a huge time saver: I get much fewer articles but all of them are relevant to my biopharma searches.”
Web Alerts like Sienna’s bioprocessing alert allow her to keep track of news from sources she wouldn’t have found before. “And they’re so much less noisy than Google Alerts.”
Prioritizing top reads across favorite biopharma sources
For topics Sienna and her team are a bit more familiar with, they already know their favorite sources to seek out information: news sites, research publications, and industry publications. They added all of these sources to Feedly, and asked Leo to prioritize must-reads about drug manufacturers, lists of specific drugs, or specific topics like CRISPR.
The team also adds Mute Filters to filter out the noise for certain topics. For example, in their Process Analytical Technology Innovation Feed, they’ve muted market reports, sports, and recreational drugs so they don’t get distracted by irrelevant results.
Asking Leo to find similar articles to previously saved content
Since the team is already spending hours reading articles and saving them to Boards, they leverage their curation efforts with Like Boards. “We save things to boards to train Leo,” explains Sienna. Like Boards are a niche feature that this team uses heavily. While we at Feedly pre-train Leo on broad topics, Like Boards are an easy way for users to train Leo to prioritize based on the content they’ve saved to Boards. Instead of surfacing articles about a specific topic, Leo will find articles that share commonalities with what you’ve already saved.
When Sienna and her team create a Like Board Priority, Leo learns the types of articles they save, and then prioritizes similar articles in their Feeds.
THE RESULTS
A streamlined way to share critical information with hundreds across the company
With the information they gather in Feedly, Sienna and her team spend less than an hour per day to assemble informative weekly newsletters for 765 recipients. And instead of fielding multiple emails and alerts, they enjoy the peace of mind of getting all their open-source biopharma intelligence in a single location inside Feedly.
By using Web Alerts, Priorities, and Like Boards inside Feedly, Sienna’s team can keep track of industry news and get insights from sources they might have missed with their limited time.
“If we didn’t have Feedly, we wouldn’t be able to capture the information in one place. We’d have to sign up for more email newsletters and then from there we’d have to go through the whole newsletter, whereas with Feedly you can go through one story at a time, all in one feed.”
Now that Sienna and her team have the information gathering process down to a science, she’s excited to explore other functionalities, like saving articles to Boards as a way of sharing with the team and broader company.
And beyond biopharma research? Sienna takes full advantage of the ability to save articles to personal boards, invisible to her team. She has a dedicated Board in Feedly for recipes 🍳
For more inspiration on using Feedly for personal use, see how one tech executive uses Feedly to fuel his passion project.
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