using sentiment analysis in pharma and biotech

Sentiment Analysisin Pharma

Sally Church, Ph.D

Understanding about how people feel abouttheir treatment and disease is critical

• PR tools give a big picture from media hits, but are lessuseful for more granular analysis.

• Current buzz metric tools are useful for relative marketshare of noise, but not for deep analysis.

• Traditional qualitative market research has limitations inhuman analysis.

• Quantitative analysis for market segmentation isexpensive and usually based on physician rather thanpatient sentiments.

• Rise of science, patient bloggers and social media as animportant mediums for evaluating sentiments means weneed new and better tools.

What is the basis of our approach?

• The underlying philosophy of the Leximancersystem is that meaning must be emergent fromtext and therefore not biased by external pre-definition.

• This has resulted in a methodology involvingidentification of a Thesaurus of supportingdefining terms being 'bootstrapped' to an originalemergent seed-word, to form a Concept entity.

• It is a fully-automated discovery process usingthe original text corpus.

Analysis can be from private recordedinterviews or public information on internet

Control panels allow a deeper analyticalframework to be applied by our analysts

Using a Thesaurus of words, +ve or -veassociations can be established

The tool groups together word associationsto build a Concept Map

You can also drill down to specifics to look atassociations more carefully

Unfavourablethemeshowingsymptomsand sideeffects

We are now working with Pharma clientsusing the tool in a number of different ways

Market Research:• Qualitative interviews• Segmentation• Unmet medical needs

Sentiments can be:• Therapies• Diseases• Companies• Physicians or Patients

PR and Advocacy:• Media Monitoring• Issues Management• Social Media Outreach

sally@icarusconsultants.com

Icarus Consultants, IncO: 201 204 9210T: 201 780 2778