Why Klick Health, Oxford PharmaGenesis chose to join forces
(L to R) Chris Winchester, Holly Henry, and Richard White
As pharma companies look to coordinate engagement efforts among physicians, payers, and patients, agencies that historically specialised in either medical communications or commercial strategy are increasingly trying to bridge both worlds. Klick Health's recent acquisition of Oxford PharmaGenesis reflects that shift.
“Clearly for a lot of reasons that have been entrenched for some time, commercial and medical have to be separated,” Oxford PharmaGenesis' chief operating officer, Richard White, told pharmaphorum in an August interview. “But what we're seeing is that the work they do has to join up properly – at the level of the audiences, at the level of HCPs, payers, health systems, patients, you name it. And what we really feel is that joining forces puts us in a position to embrace that.”
A synergy of strengths
Klick Health now brands itself as a commercialisation partner for life sciences, but its roots are as a classic creative-focused healthcare marketing agency, as evidenced by their recent Agency of the Year win at Cannes Lions. Oxford, on the other hand, is a communications consultancy with a strong focus on the scientific side of communications: medical affairs, medical communications, and more, with an emphasis on scientific credibility.
The synergy of those strengths positions the combined company to tackle a marketing and commercialisation world increasingly defined by that convergence – which is partly driven by the way AI is changing content consumption in healthcare.
“Large language models are increasingly elevating content from very highly authoritative and high-value sources such as peer-reviewed journals,” said Klick Health's chief medical officer, Holly Henry. “By teaming up with a company who is excellent and absolutely uniquely equipped to meet these challenges in the publications world, highly medical, highly renowned and respected, we can help our clients accelerate their commercial success.”
While the deal was an acquisition of Oxford by Klick, White, Henry, and Oxford PharmaGenesis CEO Chris Winchester all stressed that, culturally, they are treating it more like a merger of equals.
“The legality is an acquisition, but the ethos is a merger, you know, joining forces is the terminology that we're using because we're going to learn from each other,” Winchester said. “We're already seeing that in multiple different ways.”
A merger of opportunity, not necessity
The company leaders are excited about the areas in which their complementary capabilities create end-to-end services that weren’t available before for either company.
“One example that we recognised right off the bat is in the real-world evidence space,” Henry said. “From the very beginning of determining strategically what real-world evidence we should be recommending that the client consider, to identifying the datasets that they should be considering, to actually generating the data, to then writing, publication, and communication of said data. We now have that A-to-Z capability together.”
And while AI is part of what created the circumstances that drove the merger, it’s also an area where the combined company hopes to innovate.
“Klick has been doing some incredible things with technology and with AI,” White said, even before the current LLM era. “They work with the full range of tools. It's about the best approach for the task in hand, and they've created some really incredible things, perhaps more on the commercial side. Now, we're looking at these and thinking, oh my goodness, this could have application across the board with medical clients, and those really would be new things. There's nobody else doing that. So, there's real excitement there about this development engine that can turn our ideas into things that are going to benefit clients.”
"This is a merger of opportunity, not necessity," Henry said. And the proof is that the company is growing and hiring out of the merger, rather than cutting redundancies.
“This joining of forces is providing a lot of growth both for our clients [and] for our team,” she said. “So, we are growing. We are definitely expanding our team.”
