Health IT

Can charitable incentives boost social media marketing? AstraZeneca tests that theory with breast cancer website

Social media has become an important tool for pharmaceutical companies to raise brand awareness and assess the public’s appetite for its products. Some groups are also studying the effect of financial and charitable incentives to influence behavior. Now AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) has combined these in one website promoting national breast cancer awareness month. AstraZeneca division […]

By Stephanie Baum on October 14, 2013

Social media has become an important tool for pharmaceutical companies to raise brand awareness and assess the public’s appetite for its products. Some groups are also studying the effect of financial and charitable incentives to influence behavior. Now AstraZeneca (NYSE: AZN) has combined these in one website promoting national breast cancer awareness month.

AstraZeneca division MedImmune specialty Care runs the metastatic breast cancer website, MyMBCStory.com/awareness. It’s designed to provide information about the condition. AstraZeneca said in an emailed statement that it will make donations each time visitors to the site share content from the website on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and other social media venues. AstraZeneca said it will make the donations to patient support groups Living Beyond Breast Cancer and Metastatic Breast Cancer Network.Donations will be made up to $28,000, which corresponds with the 28 years since the start of National Breast Cancer Awareness month.

It also started the My+Story online resource center. The website calls attention to the needs of women living with metastatic breast cancer.

AstraZeneca estimates that 30 percent of breast cancers become metastatic or spread to other parts of the body beyond the original tumor.

As the pharmaceutical industry makes progress using genome mapping to develop more personalized and effective treatments for different cancers, metastatic cancer patients are set to benefit too. Some companies are developing ways to combine genomic analysis with proteomics. A pilot study by the Side Out Foundation is pairing a novel protein activation mapping technology with genomics to develop more effective treatments.

[Photo Credit: Rawich]