Hey, guys. Welcome to the podcast. My guests today are Tim Bialekki, MSL for Sanofi, and Alec McCarthy, who's a biomaterial engineer. And we talk about an interesting new way to identify trends in medical affairs through a social technology called social arbitrage. It's really, really interesting stuff. I think you guys are gonna enjoy it. Don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn and YouTube and Instagram and Clubhouse and all that good stuff, And thanks for listening.
Welcome to MSL talk with Tom Caravella, a podcast specifically designed for MSLs and all things field medical. Hey, Alec and Tim. How you guys doing? Thanks for joining me. Good. Good. How are you? Awesome. Awesome. Yeah. Good to be here. Excited to, finally get on this, illustrious podcast. Illustrious. Actually, that's a that's a new word. We I haven't had anybody call it illustrious, but I am grateful for you guys. And I'm I'm I appreciate you coming on, and I'm excited.
I'm excited to hear about this. I don't think a lot of people are aware of this new social paradigm. But before we get into that, why don't we do introductions? So, Alec, why don't we start with you? Yeah. So I'm a PhD candidate in the regenerative medicine and biomaterial design program at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. Cool, man. Good stuff. Tim? Yeah. Actually, I got my PhD from the same, I'm moderate there as Alec.
I was Yeah. At UNMC, and now I'm currently a medical science liaison for Sanofi Genzyme, in the solid tumor, oncology space. And I just also wanna reiterate that, views that I will express here are mine own and, do not necessarily reflect those of my employer. Cool. Awesome. Got all the got all the pleasantries out of the way. Gotta do it. So then do you guys know each other from school? No. Actually, we are quite some years apart where we had a lot of mutual interests.
So we always kind of, joke that, we wish we did get to a chance to go to school together, but, because we have so many interest that do align. Yeah. Alec actually reached out to me with interest in the MSO, role and career as a as a whole. So discussions. Yes. Cool. And so Alec reached out to me and with this idea and explained this concept, this research approach, and this social arbitrage, concept. So why don't we just start there?
Alec, maybe you could start by just explaining what this is and how you came about it and and just an overview on how it works, and then maybe we can go to Tim and and get his take on it. Yeah. Cool. So so social arbitrage is kind of this idea that, we can harness social data to kind of identify emerging trends before, you know, the market as a whole or before, you know, entire, sections in this in this case, pharmaceutical industry could maybe pick up on them.
And the way I was introduced to the idea was, kind of a roundabout way. I was doing some some work for for a guy in San Francisco, who was looking at stocks and particularly biomedical stocks. And so I kinda wanted to get an idea, you know, like, what he was working on, so I read this book, by Jack Swagger called Unknown Market Wizards. And in that book, they introduce Chris Camillo, who is, he's a he 1st and foremost, a computer coder, and second of all, an investor.
And he talks about this concept of social arbitrage, where he scrapes the Internet, Google, Twitter, Facebook for mentions, of certain companies or stocks, and then he analyzes the sentiment around them. So a really good example from the book was, in 2017 or 2018, he sees a bunch of mentions for Elmer's glue because everybody was doing DIY slime, at home. And so he invested in Newell Brands, which is the kind of the parent company of Elmer's glue.
And he got in, you know, before, that that news went mainstream, and he ended up making, like, a very profitable trade from this. And he just continually applied it and and, you know, realize I'm on to something here. If we probe, kind of what people social data, social interest, and ideas in companies, we can really come up with some useful data, you know, before it's it's priced in or or accounted for in the field as a whole. And so when I read that, I thought, wow, that's really interesting.
I wonder if anybody is applying this to medicine. And so I kinda started poking around. It looks like maybe a couple people have most of the data, you know, as proprietary, until I stumbled onto Google Trends. And, and it was during during COVID, And so I immediately was like, wow. This, you know, this could be really impactful here. I can see the interest in COVID going up and down with the news. I can see the increase in Google's for the symptoms, and I really thought, wow.
This is something that's powerful, and it's you know, I've never thought of it, and I don't think a lot of other people have really even, you know, thought to check the social data around something. So that's kind of the roundabout story of how, you know, I got the idea to start working kind of in this in this niche field and using social data to answer some questions. Okay. So let me go back just so we all understand what you're saying.
What you're saying is that you're looking at searches and results of searches to see what's trending. And then you take that data from the results, and then you apply it to a specific area to identify or forecast what people's interests are. Does that make sense? Is that what it is? Yep. That's exactly right. So we can search a term in Google Trends, and we can directly access that data.
And they normalize, all of the interest data, to a relative search volume, so we loosely call relative search volume, social interest or public interest. And we can directly download those raw datas at any time frame that we want, down to city and local, regions. We can do different time points. So there's a lot of ways to kind of handle and process the data. But, yeah, that's exactly right. So using Google Trends to kind of monitor, searches, or trends overall.
I have one more question about the technical side of it, but then I wanna get Tim's input. So going back, you're you make it sound so easy. Like, oh, yeah. You just do this. You just do that. Like, do you have to be technical to do this? How exactly what what do you really do? Yeah. So you don't need to be, tech you know, strong technical skills to use Google Trends.
You know, it's as simple as going to Google Trends, the website, and then searching, over some time period what you're interested in. But when it comes to the data analysis and really making that observational data useful as in, you know, maybe predicting a trend or identifying some kind of meaningful correlation, then it becomes a little bit more complicated. Okay. And that's where, one of our coauthors, Daniel McGoldrick, who's a computer engineer, has helped us a lot along the way. Got you.
And then that's really massaging the data and trying to take you know, kinda get the results and figure out what it all means and put it into a format that you can actually do something with. Yep. Exactly. Got you. So, Tim, you're in MSL. How'd you get involved? Where where did you wind up jumping into this with Alec? Yeah. It's kind of a funny story. I mean, Alec reached out to me because he was interested in the MSL role.
Mhmm. Because we share a, you know, a connection via our my own modern current institution. Mhmm. We chatted quite a bit about that, and, you know, we just had a great conversation, and he kinda led to discussing a little bit about his project.
And I hope he'll get into a little bit more, but, you know, we're gonna be talking about how we're using this this tool, Google Trends, in the case of the MSL role, but Alec has actually done some great work with his other colleague, in in the realm of COVID vaccinations, which is is really great use case of this technology. But we started talking a little bit about how this could be applied to oncology, specifically and maybe also the MSL role, and that's kind of what brought us here today.
Got you. So we should def I mean, I definitely wanna talk about obviously, I think we wanna get to the point where we talk through how this applies to the MSL role, how it can be used by organizations and MSL leaders to identify trends. But maybe we should talk a little bit more about the application. Do you wanna talk about the COVID this COVID research that you're doing? Yeah. Sure. So, I think this was the first large application, and it, obviously, it was sort of a timing thing.
You know, a lot of people were getting into the markets when when COVID started, and then, you know, COVID was we were in the middle of COVID when I really started to play with the data.
And so the use case that we found was we we by, you know, incorporating several search terms, such as COVID vaccine near me, how to get a COVID vaccine, and seeing those trends on a state level, we then took the actual daily vaccination rates from each state, and we ran Pearson correlation, and determined that in 41 states, we could significantly predict over a 1 to 14 day window, those actual daily vaccination rates for each state.
So, you know, taking it a step further, Google Trends procures related searches, and we went a a step further and we looked at the sentiment around the vaccinations. So we found out that people were more likely to Google Moderna side effects rather than Johnson and Johnson or Pfizer side effects. And so, you know, it gave us a lot we kind of contextualized this trend data with, you know, some related Google trends, procured search terms.
And I think, you know, taking taking it as a whole, we could predict, and it particularly in states that had low vaccine utilization, we thought this could be extremely important. So one, we could identify regions in the state that had high search interest, but maybe a low vaccination rate. So we thought that might tell you, you know, people in this region are seeking the vaccine, but perhaps there's some logistical reason why they're still unvaccinated or they have a low vaccination rate.
And in addition to that, you know, if you saw a rapid spike in these search trends, you would typically see, you know, 1 to 7 days later, you would see this spike in vaccinations. And if you're a state a smaller state like Nebraska where where I currently am, if you have a large increase in interest and you can predict this large increase in actual vaccinations, Maybe that gives us a little bit more time to either staff properly or get our hands on vaccines.
You know, if we if we need to freeze or thaw some of our vax our vaccines that are are not used, you know, it kind of gives us this additional, very useful window to either staff, get our hands on vaccines, or identify these these regions that are maybe seeking them actively, but for some reason, they're just not getting vaccinated. Yeah. So it's I think we got a lot of really useful data out of it. That's interesting.
It's a very interesting explanation and a very useful explanation of how it works. So I appreciate the, you know, the the further insight into what social arbitrage is, how you can use it, and what you can get from it. So now I'm really curious to see how this can be applied to the pharmaceutical industry, specifically the MSL world and MSLs and medical affairs. So let's talk about that. I mean, jump in, Tim, Alec, whoever wants to jump in.
Yeah. I mean and just first, I think that that COVID vaccination example is is fantastic for kinda illustrating how the useless data can be, but it's only useful to a point because while it's you know, Google Trends data is fairly approachable. It's easy to learn. It's very difficult to master, and it really has limitations unless you pair it with other data.
So in that case, Alec was able to take those Google Trends data and pair it with the actual data coming out about vaccinations on a state by state and even county level, at at some point. So I think that kind of provides, like, a good framework moving forward as a general theme as we talk about this. But I'll let Alec talk about the general premise of of sort of what this, hypothesis was and and what we did for the study.
Right. So, so like Tim said, I kind of approached him with this this concept. You know, we were I was interested in the MSL rule. I just kind of reached out to him, and it kinda led to this long conversation. And somehow I ended up talking about the social data project. And I, you know, I was pretty curious. I personally had never heard of the MSL role, until about a year ago.
So 2 years into my PhD, and I was curious, you know, I was I joined the MSL society, and I'd saw the figures, you know, I think 20% projected job growth rate. So, obviously, you know, MSL is the MSL career is growing. I'd never heard of it. I wanted to figure out, you know, am I am I an anomaly, or is there some kind of a disconnect between the actual interest and the role and the numbers that are reflected in, like, the job reportings and the growth rates?
And so it was purely out of curiosity, and and, you know, I just wanted to see if there is some trend that matched that, that projected growth rate. And so, you know, I pitched it to Tim. I think on our follow-up call was like, hey. Let's we should do a a Google Trends study on the MSL, you know, and kinda like the medical affairs. And let's let's see what it says. Let's see if the social interest reflects, you know, the actual job growth data. Awesome.
So that's the hypothesis that you made purely observational. Right. I just I just wanted to see. I didn't really have any you know, I didn't I wasn't expecting anything per se. Right. So you came into it and had this idea. And so but let me go back.
You can really come up with any hypothesis, any research finding or trend analysis, really anything that you have a hunch or an interest in, and then apply it to the Google Trends application to really assess and figure out what those results are actually telling you. You just because you have an interest in the MSL role, you just figured, well, let me just let me apply it to that and see what happens. Yep. Exactly.
It was just one of those things where, you know, I I knew that the job growth data was pointing up. And I just wondered, why hadn't I heard of this? Why doesn't anybody around me talk about this? So what were you expecting to find? What did you think was gonna happen? I definitely thought that we would see, like, an increase, in interest in the role and particularly over the last year during COVID because we were talking, you know, about science and pharmaceutical industry so much. Right.
So what happened? What'd you find? So we found over a 10 year period a significant increase in interest of the role. But interestingly, we actually found a decrease in interest, over the last year. So during COVID, in in interest in the role decreased. I would have totally thought the opposite. Tim, what do you think? Do you agree with that? Yeah. I totally agree. I think it when I first saw the results, I was very surprised.
And in between that even within the last 5 years, it was relatively stagnant. It was only increased, interest by about 0.6%. So the general trend is kind of a down increase in relative search volume and interest, at least according to Google Trends. But, again, this is on a general, basis. Right. But what do you think it why do you think that do you have any do you have any kind of thought as to why that might be the case?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's kinda hard to read into that a little bit without, you know, making some very extraordinary guesses, but it's potentially the case that there might have been, especially in the last 12 months, the decrease, maybe because of a potential employment downturn Mhmm. Due to the pandemic. There may have been a less hiring that was actually happening.
Mhmm. And maybe, given that a lot of these, if we think about it at least, how these terms relate, they're generally, people that are unfamiliar, if you could think about it. Right. They're searching for an MSL. They're probably unfamiliar with the career. So it might be people that are in Pharm b programs.
It might be people that are in PhD programs, and they might be, more concerned about other things at this point instead of thinking about a career, especially if there's a hiatus in lab work or or studies in general. Yeah. That is interesting. And I don't know I I guess my explanation because I would have thought it was the opposite. Because on our side, we're seeing all the numbers increase. We're seeing more MSLs getting hired, more positions becoming available.
And I know that my phone's not ringing less. I could tell you that. And the inquiries are not less. There are more and more people that are looking to break into the role than ever before. And maybe the reason for the numbers being a little skewed was because of COVID. COVID threw everything off. It just I I think it's almost a bad example because things were never they weren't just it wasn't a normal environment.
So I don't think that that's a great, you know, time period to really kinda do that example. But that being said, then why would the trend be show an increase in 10 years, but the last 5 years be a little flat? Right. And I I actually think that's a great question. And one way to maybe explain that is because people are becoming more familiar with the role and what it entails through other channels.
So that could be, for instance, even podcast like yourself, like, that you have, that you host or things like the, other other avenues of learning about it. Maybe they're learning about the career like Alec did by just, learning it on his own, through someone in his, network. So I think that could also be the case. Maybe if people are just more familiar with it. Yeah. Well, that makes sense. That totally makes sense.
Mhmm. Maybe 10 years ago, it was so it was just more I guess it was a newer concept maybe. And for those of us that have been in industry for a long time, we don't consider this a new concept. But it certainly is a newer concept as far as the the the importance and the value of field medical affairs now versus the year 2000, let's say. If we go way back, I know that the first MSL happened many, many years ago, 1967 upjohn.
We all know the story, but it wasn't the position wasn't really adopted until, like, the late nineties, early 2 thousands where it really took off, and companies were building MSL teams. Now we're seeing and even then, it was just large pharma that were building MSL teams. Now everybody has an MSL team. If you're a small biotech company with 10 employees, sometimes you're building out an MSL team to get ready to commercialize product.
So there's a lot of the the the paradigm shift that has happened in the last 20 years is significant. At the 10 year mark, again, maybe it wasn't new anymore. Maybe that's why there's there was that or 15 year mark, I guess, if it's the last 5 years. So I don't know. Listen. We're kind of all just guessing at this point and spitballing. So let's get back to this concept and how it can be applied. So, Alec, you applied it to interest and came up with these results. You can apply it to anything.
So I'm curious, like, what other trends do you think this would be good to apply for as it relates to medical affairs and the MSL role specifically? Yeah. So so Tim can probably answer this, a little bit better than me, but I do wanna say that kind of the conclusion of our, you know, our last little discussion there was, considering catalyzing events that will drive significant increases or decreases in the volume.
And, you know, we're we all kind of have the same hypothesis about why the specific trend is trending down. And I think, looking at the data when I initially did, we should consider things like, you know, the cheeky scientist talking about the MSL role and the emergence of the MSL society where those events are probably driving a spike in interest.
And so while that may trend it down, you know, over 1 year or 5 years, those catalyzing events really raise the average search volume, you know, 10 years prior. So I think I think your analysis of that is spot on. But but yeah. Sorry. Back to the point. A couple things that Tim and I talked about, you know, really using this, as a powerful tool for medical affairs is and a couple, you know, projects that we've kicked around is, how are people searching for drugs?
Where are they searching, you know, for different drugs? Are they using brand name? Are they using generic name? Are the interests going up or down after new product launch, and how much? Does the interest correlate to specific targeted marketing tactics? And regionally, are there any areas that we feel might be underserved, as in is this region particularly, you know, searching for a certain drug and maybe they have low prescription rates.
So those are all extremely you know, I think in terms of how easy this data is to get, that could be potentially very useful applications for it in medical affairs. Yeah. And just to kinda piggyback on that, I mean, absolutely, this is a free tool. We already know that a lot of the especially larger pharmaceutical companies, and and and health care companies are utilizing data regularly.
Primarily a lot of, very, highly expensive, right, datasets, for a lot of, decisions that are made, from a strategic standpoint. And I think coupling this or complementing that data with something like Google Trends provides another lens through sentiment.
And when when Alec talks about brand name drug in a search term versus a generic name for a drug, what we commonly see in the associated search terms, when you use generic and you look at those, you see things that are more associated with what a health care provider or health care professional professional will actually use.
Mhmm. And so that indicates that they're like, that as a search term itself gives you a little bit more insight into what HCPs might be thinking about a particular drug in some spike.
Again, too, one thing that's also interesting is that if you look at any particular we've only done this a little in a preliminary analysis standpoint, but if you look at, some drugs and you compare them across Google Trends with their search volume and use generic names specifically, it actually reflects very accurately their market share for a particular disease.
Wow. So if you think about how much, you know, time and money might be spent on doing that analysis on their own, and you can get kind of a brief glimpse on it from, Google Trends, which is a free service, that's also pretty interesting. Again, this is a correlation. We haven't done a real, you know, hardcore analysis of this just yet, but that's what everything trend, tends to to point towards.
And then, again, from a bigger picture health care standpoint, Alec gave a great example of COVID vaccinations. And the implications for that could be potentially huge for public health depending on, how the data is used in the future and how it's organized into those kind of metrics. But I think something similarly for oncology, at least, is we also saw huge decreases in, search terms that are associated with cancer screenings during the COVID pandemic.
And that data matches very closely to actually other industry reports about decrease in actual cancer screening. So if you look for search terms like mammogram near me, they completely plummet, during, most of the pandemic, and then we start to see other increases in in, in search terms related to that. So it's been an interesting finding, and I don't know exactly how that could particularly help in some cases, but it might be, interesting in in certain in certain circumstances.
Oh, it's totally interesting. My mind is, like, it's spinning right now with ideas of how this can be applied. So I can only imagine MSL leadership and folks that are at the strategic level listening to something like this and saying, wow.
If we can get a look into inside of the minds of certain communities, let's call it, it would just be it would be really advantageous because there's so much strategy involved in and I'm I'm talking specifically about medical affairs, but any company obviously has to set strategy, and they have to try to forecast trends. And I know companies spend a ton of money on data and tools.
So I can imagine even from a hiring perspective, I would imagine I'm taking this back to, like, what I do for a living. So even from a hiring to be able to forecast hiring trends, I mean, I would love to see that type of scenario. Yeah. Absolutely. And I think, the results of this paper that we're talking about today, you know, particularly, it is limited in its scope. We're just looking at MSO search terms.
Mhmm. But it still provides some insight into that key aspect of the role, especially for MSO leaders, is that MSO candidate recruitment. Right?
And Right. And I think that if we look at, you know, although, like, the general search terms have remained relatively stagnant for the last 5 years, when we take a look at the associated search terms that are more career oriented or career related, so if they say MSL salary or MSL jobs or openings, that's actually significantly increased within that same time frame. So that suggests that there has been, increase in the career as the in the role as a career.
And I think at least, anecdotally, I mean, we have seen that, like, a plenty, especially with, folks that might be like Alec and myself when we were just coming out of our PhD programs, but also people that are in farming pre programs or even MB programs, trying to figure out, what this job is about and what it looks like as a role. And so, you know, if there was and, again, this analysis is still somewhat, limited in its scope.
But if you had additional statement level analysis, maybe from other internal or external datasets, then this could potentially aid hiring managers, at least when it comes to new, brand new candidates and MSLs. I think we found some really interesting, data, especially even in the last year, for search terms. For instance, we had states like Michigan crack the top 3, for for locations that had the top relative search volume for some of these career associated or career related search terms.
Really? Yeah. So I think to your point, I think it really depends on how like, what search terms you use, how you analyze the data, how many data sets you're looking at. So there's probably a lot that goes into this that maybe if you looked at that if you took that same concept and looked at that 10 year period and the last 5 year period, maybe if you looked at different search terms, different datasets, it might skew it in a different way.
So I I don't even know what I'm talking about, but it just sounds like there's a lot of nuance to this. There there is a lot of nuance, and that's where like, and again, you know, if we pair it with or complement it with other existing data, that's where the strength really shines through. And it could help with identifying places that that could be potential hiring pipelines for at least brand new MSLs. At least that's something that could potentially happen depending on the data you have.
But, really, the most important part of this is it provides a framework for much more complex aspects of the MSL roles. Totally. Kinda highlight it a little bit in that Yeah. So this is you know, now that we're getting down to the nitty gritty and the nuts and bolts of it, so we all kinda I would I I I think I understand this now, and it's really interesting, and it's really exciting. So how do people do this? I mean, do they hire people to do this? Do they outsource it?
So what how does how does the company if they say, yeah, I'm really interested in social arbitrage. What do they do? I think they have a couple of options. First of all, Chris Camillo sold his, his proprietary program to Wall Street, so nobody can access that. But there are other avenues, like, if you wanted to buy cookie data, or, you know, hire firms to do this, I'm sure that you could. And, they could, you know, probably give you really comprehensive reports that cost a lot of money.
But I think, you know, and even speaking to others in the industry, Tim's a great example. And hearing that a lot of people, you know, MSLs or people in medical affairs kind of take on these sort of secondary roles, I think this is an easy thing for a lot of people, kind of in these positions to learn how to do.
It's you know, if you if you're a little bit tech savvy and you can, you know, crunch the numbers or you're familiar with data analysis, you know, taking the time to figure out how to maneuver it, access the data, and post process it, you know, I think I think you can find people within within your company that can figure out how to do this and make it useful data that you can actually act on.
Yeah. Yeah. And I think, you know, there's certainly an art to being an MSO, but I think the last year has shown us that we really do have to rely on a lot of our digital tools, you know, especially when we can't be in the field and and and also learning ways of how we can use those digital tools that we've now become so reliant on at least to complement, our return to the field and and and how we can can, actually, you know, move ahead and and improve, in this space.
I think it's actually kind of interesting because it it really forced us to innovate in a lot of ways and digitize that we haven't previously. And then so one thing that's nice about something like Google Trends is that it's very, very approachable. It's something, again, that's easy to learn and difficult to master. And when you think about being in MSO role, we often get a lot of these datasets that are, you know, probably very expensive that are paid for and that are made available to us.
And a lot of times, there's not necessarily, understanding of what to do with them. But if you can take a little bit of time to do like what Alec mentioned and and go through to analyze these and compare this data with Google, then you can actually make some more informed decisions, more data driven decisions, I guess, you could say. At least that would help with, any kind of strategic goals. Yeah. It's so cool, man. It's cool stuff, and I wanna thank you both for coming on.
You guys are awesome. And, and this was really, this was this was really informative. This is not something I've ever heard of. I didn't know what it was. And, you guys did a great job really spelling it out. And I know, Alex, so you're gonna be looking for an MSL job soon. Right? I mean, you're That's that's right. I'm in PhD candidacy. I'm pretty interested in breaking into the role. Awesome. Alright. Well, listen. Here's a quick plug from my man, Alec. You heard it from him.
This guy's sharp as attack. He needs to be hired. Hire him. Let's go. So you'll be ready in December. So by January of next year, people will be lining up waiting to hire you. Fingers crossed. Wow. You deserve it. You're a great guy, Tim. Really appreciate you guys coming on. You guys are the best. And, I I I don't even know what to do with this. I feel like I need to buy stock in something. But, you guys are great. Once again, I thank you for coming on.
I I we might have to have another conversation about this in the future because I have a feeling this is gonna continue to evolve. And, if and when it does, we should see where it takes, you know, where it's taking things. But, you know, you guys, all the best to you. Have a great summer, and stay in touch. Yep. Thank you so much. Thanks, Tom. It was a pleasure. Yeah, man. Thanks so much.
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