Advisory Panels and KOLs
While testifying, Tracey had Healy explain the concept of key opinion leaders (KOLs) and drug company advisory boards.
"When a pharmaceutical company is bringing a drug to market," Healy said, "a few years before they bring the drug to the market they look at the academic physicians in the field and work out who will be the key people who will be the advocates for the drug."
"They recruit advisory panels for the drug, which will be senior figures within the field who they believe they will be able to depend on to persuade the rest of their colleagues to think seriously about using this drug," he noted.
In explaining a "national" advisory board, Healy said, when "a drug comes to market, they will have a range of senior people in the field, it could be 10 or 12 different people from different parts of the country whom they think are going to be the most influential in helping to get their drug moving within the market here in the U.S. or the U.K."
"Then there is a further group of people down below," Healy said, "who are called the key opinion leaders or KOL for short."
"These, again, are fairly senior doctors," he told the jury. "These are the people whom it is thought will go out and give lectures on the drug to the doctors who are actually doing most of the prescribing of the drug."
In the early 1990s, Healy was on a Paxil advisory board around the time the drug was launched in the UK. People who did not think Paxil was a great product would usually be dropped from the advisory panel, he told the jury.
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