Building Awareness of Alzheimer's and Recruiting a Clinical Trial for Myriad

Alzheimer's disease (AD) ravages more than 25 million people around the world.  It's a slow and brutal killer - erasing personal memories and altering personalities and behaviors - leaving people little of the identity they've built over a lifetime.  Today's AD treatments provide some temporary symptomatic relief, but nothing yet targets AD's cause.  With several people on staff directly impacted by this disease, Spectrum was eager to help this patient population and partnered with Myriad to help speed development of their drug candidate, Flurizan.
 
When we began working with Myriad, there was little awareness of Flurizan and their Phase 3 trial wasn't meeting its recruiting targets.  Spectrum changed that through an aggressive campaign that utilized a blend of tactics, including media outreach, advocacy relations, physician to physician communication, DTP, advertising, and pharmacy promotions.  This multi-faceted program paid off.  In nine months we had recruited more than 1,600 patients into Myriad's ACT-Earli-AD clinical trial.  At the time, it was the longest and largest Phase 3 trial for AD.  We also generated a tremendous amount of awareness for Myriad's development of Flurizan, securing more than 1,700 stories in national and local media as well as one-on-ones with The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, Barron's, Fortune and Forbes, The Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters. 
 
While the Phase 3 results for Flurizan were not hopeful in moving the product to market, we are confident that this research will help pave the way for other drug candidates and we look forward to continuing to play our part in advancing research in this challenging disease.