Matthew Rossen, Vice President of Marketing, BridgeBio Pharma
For Matthew Rossen it is all about the patient. “At the forefront of all our hard decisions is what’s best for the patient and how do we uncover the insight to deliver against the unique needs of each individual patient,” he explains.
Those aren’t just words for Matt, he truly backs them up. Currently, he is responsible for marketing three pre-clinical products, which mostly involves disease awareness and clinical trial initiatives. One of those products is infigratinib, a potential treatment for cholangiocarcinoma, a rare bile duct cancer that affects approximately 8,000 to 10,000 individuals a year in the U.S.
Matt and his team regularly work with the Cholangiocarcinoma Foundation’s patient advisory board to glean insights about what type of information and services would be most useful to them. For instance, they learned patients taking kinase inhibitors like infigratinib can experience nail toxicity. So to ensure patients didn’t have trouble accessing their medication, they redesigned the packaging to require less effort to remove pills from the blister pack. Work on programs like this and other initiatives have led to a 2x increase in inquiries regarding their clinical trials.
Matt and the team are also exploring ways to help patients for the company’s other pre-clinical products. For achondroplasia, a bone growth disorder that affects approximately one of 20,000 newborns, they are working on an iPad program to keep kids engaged as they go through the lengthy process of getting their limbs measured. They also developed a care kit for the patients in their trials, which provides information about nutrition, side effects, and management strategies to help give them the best chance of success.
