Dec. 4, 2025, 6:01 a.m. ET
A year ago, I was one of the top spokespeople for the pharmaceutical industry as the chief public affairs officer for the Biotechnology Innovation Organization. It was there I’d spent years creating communications strategies to push back against myriad politically popular but science-killing policies pushed by both political parties. Then last November it all became very real, very quickly.
I’d had upper back pain for months and wrote it off as typical old man aches and pains. A primary care doctor told me to lose weight, so I soldiered on for weeks. Later in a Zoom call, I learned that instead of a pulled muscle I had multiple myeloma that my doctor helpfully told me was “an incurable bone marrow cancer.”
Wait, what?!
The weird pain in my back? It was a crushed vertebra that happened because of the myeloma, an insidious disease that can turn your spine to Swiss cheese and send calcium into your bloodstream, which can kill you. Thankfully, I was well-connected and found a doctor who not only knew what the rare disease was but knew how to treat it: chemotherapy, immunotherapy and eventually a bone marrow transplant.
Fifteen years ago, myeloma was a death sentence. I’m alive today because the life science ecosystem in this country – while imperfect and costly – is intact. Because of science and the researchers who dedicated their lives for decades to finding a cure, my health care team had at their disposal chemotherapy to slow the disease, monoclonal antibodies to attack it, protein inhibitors to destroy the proteins in the cancer cells and a complete bone marrow transplant to wipe it all out.
No one wants to buy Big Pharma’s drugs. We’re forced to.
This cancer unfortunately comes back, smarter and able to better evade treatment. I’m now in complete remission and on a clinical trial for a bispecific antibody researchers “think” will deter the disease for years.
The development of all these therapies that saved and extended my life took more than 30 years and cost billions of dollars. Like it or not, most of those dollars came from drug companies, not taxpayers.
When I worked for the industry and we talked about messaging, I would constantly hear, “We just need to focus on the patients!”
Indeed, over the past three decades, drugmakers have spent tens of millions of dollars trying in vain to connect people’s sympathy and love of patients to the industry that makes cures.
I may not know medicine, but I do know messaging, and I believe more firmly now that we got it wrong.
Here’s some tough medicine for drugmakers: No one – and I mean no one – wants to buy your product. Patients are forced by disease to appreciate what you make. Your products don’t leave them with warm fuzzy feelings. Instead they are constants reminder of their disease.
When you sit for hours getting treatment you hear things. The words that best describe patients (like myself) are “grateful” and “humbled.” Those feelings are directed at health care workers and researchers whose tireless efforts in America’s hospitals and research laboratories make our survival possible.
Drug companies should promote science over products
There are more than 2 million workers involved in the drug discovery supply chain – from the lab to clinical trial researchers, through the approval process and then to your pharmacist.
But in terms of how drugmakers communicate with the public, those workers have been ignored. These are powerful voices now sitting on the sidelines.
If drug companies had spent a fraction of the money used for product promotion to instead promote the amazing, dedicated scientific researchers and the rigorous and difficult work they do over the course of decades, perhaps today the public would be more informed and less hostile toward basic science.
This hostility drives bad policy, which is what we have now with research studies canceled or postponed, lifesaving vaccines ridiculed and outlawed, and now both parties seeming to agree that arbitrary price fixing by the government will not hurt scientists’ ability to invent the cures of tomorrow.
It’s long past time for scientific researchers to get off the sidelines and engage. The attacks they face come from groups like AARP, which gets a lot of revenue from insurance companies and then spends millions of dollars to demonize the pharmaceutical industry, supposedly on behalf of seniors. The scientific community needs to fight back from the grassroots up.
The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. It’s time drugmakers write a new prescription, one that begins and ends with celebrating science.
Rich Masters is a partner at Qorvis.