Kite U.S. Patient Marketing Team
Kite, a Gilead Company
Agency Partner: Snow Companies
Kite Team:
Kip Cross, Senior Director, Alliance and Advocacy Relations
Maggie Aquavia, Senior Director of Marketing
Lauren “Mac” McIntyre, Associate Director – Patient Marketing
Changing the Way Cancer Is Treated
Launching a brand is challenging in and of itself, but launching a brand within a novel treatment category can be very challenging. Yescarta® (axicabtagene ciloleucel) is a CAR-T therapy for certain types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. It’s a targeted therapy whereby the patient’s own T cells are genetically modified to combat the cancer.
The Yescarta brand team at Kite has relaunched their patient campaign in their approach to launching this novel treatment. Through an initial landscape analysis, they realized that for this brand’s many different objectives, they needed to nurture patient engagement in a holistic way.
For their research, they worked with patients and caregivers not associated with a brand. For their internal and launch meetings, they worked with trial patients. For their marketing initiatives, they worked with patients on brand to bring testimonials and mentor programs to the interested public. To understand the ever-changing patient and caregiver needs, they put together a committee of patients and caregivers to gather opinions and insight.
Engaging with these groups has enabled the team to understand what information around CAR-T is needed from a patient/caregiver perspective, what questions they have before, during, and after treatment, and what information still needs to be clarified.
