The Patient Engagement Guide helps companies to engage patients in drug development

The ECRD is the largest European conference on rare diseases, bringing together stakeholders from near and far: from patients to doctors, government, academia, insurers and companies. This year’s conference focused on strategies for collaboration. A great opportunity to present the PEG - a tool for cooperation between companies and patients - to the conference visitors by means of an interactive poster.

In its programme 'Faster and Better from bench to bedside', HollandBIO collaborates with biotech frontrunners to create solutions that improve and speed up the drug development process. "Biotech delivers revolutionary new medicines and therapies. However far too many patients are still left empty-handed," says HollandBIO director Annemiek Verkamman. "In order to give those patients hope for effective personalised treatments, we urgently need to develop solutions that combine health, innovation and affordability."

One of those solutions is a central role for the patient perspective in every phase of the drug development process. A patient knows best what a drug should do to make an impact. Additionally, a patient’s first-hand experience can boost the drug development process in terms of both progress and quality. Patient engagement therefore not only leads to faster access to better drugs, but it also makes a lot of sense from a business perspective.

"Engaging patients may seem obvious and easy to do at first sight," says Philipp von Gallwitz, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of admedicum Business for Patients. "In practice, however, it quickly becomes clear that it is highly complex and requires skills, experience and networks new to many companies. It all comes down to a key question: how to organise patient engagement in a way that is meaningful and adds value for all parties concerned? Our experience shows that the required skills and insights don’t come naturally to every organisation."

To offer companies a helping hand, HollandBIO and admedicum teamed up to develop the PEG. The PEG is an online guide that zooms in on real-world patient engagement cases, providing an extensive amount of information and insights on this topic. Additionally, the guide contains very practical tools and checklists, which allow every organisation to get into gear and discover the mutual benefits of patient engagement.