PharmaFWD Summit Series: The Innovative Marketer

Additional panelists to be confirmed

As global dynamics reshape local healthcare realities, go-to-market strategies for new medicines are entering a new era – one that calls for greater agility, collaboration, and strategic leadership.

Evolving approaches to pricing, access, and reimbursement are influencing how companies evaluate assets, prioritize launches, and bring innovation to patients. At the same time, these shifts are creating new opportunities to rethink commercial strategy and strengthen cross-functional alignment.

Commercialization teams have an increasingly important role to play in helping organizations adapt with confidence – bringing clarity to complexity, shaping strategic direction, and ensuring patient and business needs remain aligned.

Building on the keynote address, this panel of commercial leaders will share insights into how organizations can position themselves for success in a rapidly evolving environment.

As professionals, we have each built on our talent and experiences to develop a set of heuristics, connections, processes, core memories, and values that define how we impact our teams, organizations, and ultimately patients. The more precisely you can map these elements of your fingerprint and transfer them into an AI system, the more powerfully you can expand the unique impact that only you can bring.

For example: have AI interview you about your professional attitudes and past decisions to extract your decision heuristics. Share five emails or a transcript from a meeting where you felt your voice was really authentic and have AI turn that into a persona you apply to all your prompts. Work through a process you already know well – like writing a marketing brief – with AI at your side, then turn that session into a reusable skill.

In this talk, you will learn and see demonstrated on stage practical activities to help you draw your professional fingerprint out of your head and into AI — so it can begin to truly extend your reach and impact.

The real challenge isn’t what AI can do, it’s how to scale it, operationalize it, and bring teams along. Too often, AI lives in isolated or siloed initiatives, disconnected from the day-to-day realities of brand strategy and execution. Meanwhile, expectations are rising – for personalization, insight generation, and measurable impact – all within a highly regulated, data-sensitive environment.

This session bridges the gap between ambition and execution. Grounded in real-world examples of AI adoption from pharmaceutical companies at different stages of adoption, the discussion will explore how AI is being embedded into core commercialization workflows – while navigating the critical considerations of data privacy, compliance, and governance.

Speaker to be confirmed
Virtual Hallway

Patient Support Programs (PSPs) are embedded in the Canadian pharmaceutical landscape and have become a critical component of commercialization strategies. Yet as financial pressures intensify, commercial and brand leaders need to be able to identify, measure and communicate the value they bring.

This session will explore the evolution of PSPs in Canada and ways in which to better connect PSP investments to improving patient health outcomes and market access.

Join your peers and industry leaders for interactive small-group discussions designed to dive deeper into the topic areas being raised throughout the day. These facilitated roundtables provide an opportunity to share key takeaways, exchange perspectives, and explore how insights can translate into future action.

As pharmaceutical commercialization strategies evolve alongside digital transformation and AI-enabled content creation, regulatory fluency and agility is essential.

This session will provide an overview of the current Canadian regulatory and self-regulatory landscape, explore how guidance is shifting alongside new technologies, and share strategies for working effectively with the Pharmaceutical Advertising Advisory Board (PAAB) and the Advertising Standards Canada (ASC).

Learn how to move beyond viewing compliance solely as a risk mitigation function to a strategic capability that enables agility, responsible innovation and more trust through transparent and patient-centric engagement strategies.

Identifying the right physicians to engage — whether active treaters or key influencers — is one of the most challenging steps in launching a specialty and rare disease products. It is also critical to continued product success post-launch. A two-pronged framework for physician identification adapts to the treatment landscape at hand.

When treatment data exists, patient-level analytics such as lines of therapy and shared patient networks can pinpoint active treaters and link them back to prescribers.

When there is no standard of care and traditional data falls short, alternative approaches can be brought to bear. Diagnostic testing data can surface relevant physicians, while AI and machine learning models can predict likely patients and connect them to their treating physicians.

Primary market research and nomination studies further round out the picture by mapping KOLs and centres of excellence. The result is an actionable approach to KOL identification that is adaptable to any launch or brand strategy, regardless of data availability.

As engagement channels multiply and customer journeys become less linear, measuring the effectiveness of your marketing mix becomes increasingly challenging. This session will explore current approaches to brand analytics and how measurement strategies have evolved in recent years. Panelists will discuss how data science has assisted efforts to better evaluate ROI to support more informed commercial decision-making.

The discussion will also examine emerging trends shaping the future of pharmaceutical marketing analytics and the optimal balance between building internal analytics capabilities versus leveraging external partners.