BBK Healthcare Drops PR, Bets the Company on Clinical-trial Recruiting

Author: Mark Micheli

Boston Business Journal

January 10, 2003

NEWTON — They didn't risk it all — just 35 percent to 40 percent of their business. But their gamble 18 months ago has paid off.

The founding partners of BBK Healthcare Inc. in Newton say they increased their revenue nearly 50 percent over the past year, in part because they dropped their traditional public relations accounts in the health care industry to focus exclusively on recruiting patients for clinical trials.

"It was a big decision, and it did require us to relinquish a number of big accounts," says Bonnie Brescia, one of the firm's founding partners. She estimates that BBK lost about four or five clients. But she says it wasn't scary, taking the risk and dropping what had been the company's only business when it started 20 years ago to focus on a business line it added nine years ago.

"It unraveled a lot of conflicts, so it really felt more freeing," Brescia says. She explains that the two sides of their business had different needs, and sometimes conflicts would arise. She adds, "There were sad moments, too, because we had worked with some of these clients for more than 10 years."

Focus is important to Brescia and Joan F. Bachenheimer, another founding partner of the privately held firm that now exclusively recruits patients for health care research projects. The two credit it with helping them increase revenue by $3.8 million, from $7.7 million in 2001 to $11.5 million in 2002. And they say it will help them grow revenue to $14 million in 2003, as well as keep them keenly competitive.

Drug companies and medical-device companies hire BBK to recruit patients for clinical trials so that their products can be approved for market by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. BBK uses marketing and public relations techniques to find those patients. But it's more than just running a TV ad looking for psoriasis suffers.

Sometimes it requires more discretion, such as getting articles published in niche magazines to target the right audience.

One challenge is to identify the right audience, to find out who will benefit the most from the trial and then develop a strategy for getting those patients to participate, according to Bachenheimer.

She describes BBK as a full-service patient-recruitment consulting company and says her firm tries to help medical companies from the start of the process, by helping them develop protocols for the studies, up to the end, when the company brings a product to the marketplace.

Brescia says being located in the Boston area is less important than it used to be because many of the drug companies they have as clients are global companies. She says fewer than 5 percent of their clients last year were based in Massachusetts, with most coming from New York, Washington, D.C., New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

Another way BBK increased revenue over the past year was by adding or expanding services, the two partners say. BBK grew one of its key departments — its site-services department, which works directly with the clinical trial locations to ensure patients are being enrolled efficiently.

Some other moves the company made in the past year to boost revenue:

• Increased staff by 16 percent, including hiring a full-time medical doctor. BBK now has more than 50 medical, management, advertising and public relations personnel.
• Expanded the role of the Internet. BBK creates web sites for each project, and now each web site has an interactive component that lets each clinical-trial participant — doctors, patients, the drug company — to log on, ask questions or get information.
• Realigned itself by splitting it into groups: the sales group and the implementation group. The company's hierarchy has also been replaced with a team model.

Brescia notes that BBK's timing worked out well. She says some regulatory changes — such as increased requirements for more trials and more patients — have caused more companies to seek her firm's services. And she says the marketplace for clinical-trial recruitment has also been growing as more companies feel pressure to increase earnings by launching new products.

"The pressure to get patients into clinical trials is growing and growing," says Mark Ridge, manager of clinical recruitment support at Centocor Inc. in Malvern, Pa., a biotech division of Johnson and Johnson.

Centocor recently hired BBK to do a market analysis for a clinical trial for a drug to treat ulcerative colitis. He says doctors over the past eight months have had a tough time recruiting patients for the study and Centocor hired BBK to find out why. BBK is scheduled to present its findings next month and then will help the company recruit patients.

Ridge, who has worked with BBK before, says his company hires other patient-recruitment firms too, but what sets BBK apart is that it offers a comprehensive service and has "an exceptional level of the understanding of this business."

Bachenheimer says many drug companies still try to recruit patients on their own. "Our major competition now are drug companies who think they can do it in-house," she says.

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