The Pure-Play's Guide To Branding Biosimilars

By Anna Rose Welch, Editorial & Community Director, Advancing RNA

Many of the large, innovator companies with biosimilar pipelines emphasize their brand’s history of delivering quality medicines to patients. In the face of patient and physician hesitance about the safety and efficacy of biosimilars, the brand’s prominence and past successes serve as reassurance to stakeholders of the company’s experience, quality, and reliability. But this begs the question, how do smaller biosimilar companies fit in?

I took the opportunity to speak with Peter Moesta, CEO of the newly rebranded Adello Biologics (formerly Therapeutic Proteins International, or TPI). Adello recently announced its new name and revitalized mission as a pure-play biosimilar company. Moesta not only discusses some of the challenges of rebranding a company in the biosimilar space, but also shares his thoughts on the role a smaller company’s brand will play.

The Importance Of Employees In The Rebranding Process

About a year ago, Moesta took the helm of TPI and noticed pretty quickly the company could benefit from refining its focus. Since the company’s founding in the mid-2000’s, it had worked to develop a novel, single-use biomanufacturing platform, which it would use to launch a biosimilar portfolio. Understanding the complexities of both biomanufacturing and biosimilars, Moesta understood the path to success required a singular focus. “For a small company that lived on venture funding, focusing on both technology and biosimilars was too confusing,” says Moesta. “People weren’t quite clear on what the company was trying to accomplish.”

In the end, focusing on the development of biosimilars won the day, and the proprietary technology was leveraged solely as a means to an end. But it took roughly four months for the company to redefine the company’s vision, missions, and values. The goal was to come up with a mission that would motivate and unify the company’s 120 employees. As the cry for lower healthcare prices grows louder among a number of stakeholders, Adello’s vision statement — to become the trusted choice of high-quality, affordable biosimilars for patients worldwide —  enables employees to play an integral part in lowering healthcare costs. “Our goal was to come up with a mission employees would take ownership of and say, ‘Yes, we will stand behind this,’” Moesta explains.

In fact, the rebranding efforts were carried out with help from the employees, rather than being limited solely to executives and the board. The executive team and board members were responsible for charting the company’s course toward biosimilars. But the employees played a big part in redefining the company’s mission, vision, and values. As Moesta explains, there were often lunch meetings that allowed interested employees to come and share ideas or provide feedback on proposals.

Prior to Adello, Moesta spent roughly 15 years working at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Abbott Laboratories. In larger companies such as these, employees are often unable to take part in rebranding efforts. “In big companies with thousands of employees it is nearly impossible to have all employees participate in a rebranding discussion,” says Moesta. “More often than not these efforts take place at Corporate headquarters and are then rolled out to the employees. As a small company we wanted to get our employees more directly involved, to create a better sense of ownership.”

What’s In A Company Name?

When asked how the company arrived at Adello, Moesta laughed and emphasized just how difficult it was to come up with the company’s new name. Those of you who know the work it takes to name a drug can imagine the struggle of creating a memorable and meaningful company name. (This CNBC article provides a detailed, and entertaining, glimpse into the time-consuming and costly challenge of coming up with drug names.)

After several executive team brainstorming sessions and input from employees and board members, a list of names was trademark screened. “We actually had to discard many of the names we’d come up with,” Moesta admits. “Most of what you can think of is already taken.”  

The name Adello was created from a combination of Latin and Italian words. The “ad” comes from the Latin word aditum, meaning access. The “ello” comes from the Italian word gemello, meaning “twin.”   Put the two halves together and Adello references access and similarity, both core components of the company’s vision. 

“Since it’s our mission to develop the twin to an existing brand, we thought this name was fitting,” Moesta explains.

How To Brand Biosimilars

Many of the big, hybrid companies with blockbuster innovators and biosimilar pipelines rely on the trust their brands have established after many successful years on the market. To Moesta, this company history is a defining difference between how a larger biosimilar company approaches its brand compared to a smaller biosimilar company. “Many of the big companies are rooted in history and the accomplishments of past decades,” he describes. “This provides employees with a strong feeling of belonging and pride in what the company has accomplished in the past.”

On the other hand, a smaller company, like Adello, might not have as long a history or as many resources to dedicate to a wide variety of development projects. “Ideally, a small company will have a concise vision of what they want to become,” Moesta emphasizes. “A small company wants to look forward and derive pride from what it can and does achieve.”

Adello currently has two biosimilars — filgrastim and pegfilgrastim — in clinical trials. The company hopes to file these two biosimilars in 2017 as it continues to advance an adalimumab biosimilar through preclinical development.

Even though a company might not have a biosimilar on the market yet, Moesta argues there are still ways to begin building a brand. The first way would be to publish and present the results of analytical, clinical, pharmacology, and confirmatory clinical work at various forums and events.

Establishing an educational initiative is another important step. “A brand should stand for quality,” he says. “What we have to do as a company and industry is educate doctors and patients about the quality of the products we produce. I feel this is the biggest challenge remaining in the U.S. for biosimilars.”

But these biosimilar branding efforts will likely differ from the efforts employed for innovator drugs. A company launching an innovator drug does need to focus on education. After all, the ins-and-outs of a new drug (i.e., clinical data, health benefits, method of administration) will need to be relayed to physicians, patients, and payers.

But biosimilars are highly similar to existing biologics, with which stakeholders are already familiar. Moesta expects the marketing of biosimilars will differ from product to product, and will need to be targeted to different stakeholders. Prescribers, for instance, will be drawn to different information than a group purchasing organization (GPO) or a pharmacy benefit manager (PBM). (Take, for instance, Express Scripts’ CMO Steve Miller’s discussion on the importance of pharmacoeconomic data to a PBM as opposed to the analytical and clinical information prioritized by the FDA.)

Ultimately, patients and physicians gravitate toward names they trust when choosing a medication. The end goal for every biosimilar company — large or small — is to become one of those trusted brands. When asked if it will be more important to have a stronger brand-name company or biosimilar, Moesta says he anticipates the biosimilar space will evolve to resemble the generics space — especially when interchangeable biosimilars enter the pharmacy.  

“Regardless of whether or not our products will be automatically substituted, both our company and our products need to be branded in a way that connects our customers to the culture of quality we are building at Adello,” Moesta offers.