Medical Affairs Survey 2022 (Japan insights edition)

Current situation and issues, and outlook of Japan’s medical affairs organisations

Medical affairs (hereinafter ‘MA’) refers to the functions and organisations of the same name within pharmaceutical and life science companies, whose primary role is medical and scientific communication with external stakeholders including scientific experts, medical doctors and other healthcare providers. The scope of communication for which MA organisations are responsible for includes both the transmission and collection of information. This includes presenting papers at medical conferences or publishing them in medical journals, as well as the collection of KOL^*1 insights by MSLs^*2 or via medical advisory board meetings. Many MA organisations also have medical information (MI) functions, which are in charge of communication with external customers who seek scientific information on the company’s products or relevant therapeutic areas. MA organisations are also responsible for identifying important UMNs^*3 from the insights they collect through a variety of communication channels, and developing and executing plans to meet those needs. This cycle represents the core function of MA as the key scientific driver of pharmaceutical activities (Figure 1).

Each MA organisation usually focusses on UMNs that relate to specific diseases or therapeutic areas, and their goal is essentially to maximise the scientific value of the company’s products or services. In other words, MA organisations work to achieve a state where, for example, a drug helps as many of the right patients at the right time and through the right dosing, backed by accurate medical evidence generated by physicians who have sufficient knowledge about both the drug and the relevant data. An MA organisation’s mission is to create such a state and eventually improve patient and disease prognoses.

As medical science and therapeutic methods continue to advance, companies are increasingly called upon to practice EBM^*4 and personalised or precision medicine. In this increasingly complex healthcare environment, MA organisations are also called upon to play broader and more important roles in the industry. At the same time, however, MA organisations have also struggled to achieve sufficient recognition and understanding both internally and externally. This is partly because of the relatively short history of MA and the lack of established KPIs that other pharmaceutical functions have, such as sales results for a business division or drug development timelines and milestones for R&D. In addition, the recent introduction of tighter industry guidelines and regulations in Japan around product information communication with HCPs*⁵, the conducting of clinical trials, and transparency in hospital/KOL relationships has brought additional challenges to MA activities.

Amidst this backdrop, PwC Consulting LLC conducted a survey of MA organisations in Japan to understand the current situation and issues they face, as well as MA leaders’ outlook on the future of MA functions. We also held individual interviews with all of the survey respondents, who are leaders of MA organisations in Japan, to explain our intentions in conducting the survey and to further explore the details of their responses. Many leaders have shared their honest opinions about the current situation and future outlook of MA with us, enabling us to generate new findings on MA organisations in Japan. For example, while the broad and diverse scope of responsibilities of MA organisations is one of their strengths, it is also one of the factors that makes MA organisations difficult for other organisations to understand. Our survey results revealed that the scope of responsibility and details of and attitudes toward tasks were shared by most MA organisations across companies (Figure 2). We found, for example, that there are certain tasks which all MA organisations perform with a high degree of confidence and plan to continue to perform in the future (core MA tasks), as well as collaborative areas which most MA organisations recognise as important but have not yet been able to achieve to their satisfaction (impact on other functions), and areas in which they are still unsure about their responsibilities (emerging fields). Through this survey, we were also able to organise our view on the ideal future state of MA functions, the value they are being called upon to provide, and the essential elements they need to achieve that value (Figure 3).

In this report, we present the actual survey results in detail as well as our analysis and summary.

*1 KOL: Key opinion leader; a trusted medical expert with a wealth of expertise in the relevant field and strong influence in the medical community

*2 MSL: Medical science liaison; a specialised consultant who deals with external medical professionals through scientific exchange, solely independent from the commercial activity of the company

*3: UMNs: Unmet medical needs; various information or methods needed to achieve ideal treatment for patients or an ideal state of health for the general public

*4 EBM: Evidence-based medicine

*5 HCPs: Healthcare professionals