Hello,

This is Yakov Pakhomov, Medical Director at Medical Adviser's Group.
I am convinced that an advisory board is one of the most intelligent and powerful tools in the pharma arsenal. With the right event architecture, it helps generate valuable insights, identify strategic opportunities, and build trust within the medical community.

Sometimes advisory boards are held just for the sake of formality or mainly for marketing purposes. But what truly interests me is when their full potential is unlocked.

Below, I’ll share some trends we see in our advisory board practice, along with a few recent case studies.

I share these insights about once a month. If you find them useful—great! If not, feel free to unsubscribe at any time here 🙂

In companies where it’s important to see how KOL insights are transformed into action and influence strategy and practice, KPIs are introduced for advisory boards:

• Were insights integrated into clinical guidelines?
• Did materials for HCPs change and become more applicable?
• Did recommendations impact clinical trial design?
• Were the results used in access strategies or educational programs (CME)?

To track this chain of changes, companies use the Insight to Action loop and an Insight Tracker—a working document where opinions, responsible persons, actions taken, and outcomes are recorded.

In the past, advisory boards often became platforms for pushing a company agenda (“advocacy boards”). Now, the focus is on honest dialogue, expert feedback, and analysis of real-world practice.
A modern KOL is not just a passive audience, but a co-author of solutions and a strategic partner.
An advisory board is a tool for exploring unmet needs, testing hypotheses, and gathering critical information—often even before launch. A well-designed board becomes a catalyst for refining clinical strategy, patient journey, or indication selection.

Modular advisory boards are not just asynchronous formats. They are systems of several sessions, each with its own goal and content. Between sessions, analytics and preparation are carried out.
For example:
Session 1: Formulating problems and hypotheses

• Collecting written opinions / Delphi panel voting
• Analyzing disagreements, preparing materials

Session 2: Finalizing recommendations

• Publication / CME module / Guideline
• This approach allows you to:
• Respect KOLs’ time and distribute engagement
• Analyzing disagreements more deeply
• Give experts time to reflect

A single project may combine:

• Delphi voting + follow-up Advisory Board
• HCP survey + Mentimeter
• Interactive visualization of opinions + panel discussion

AI helps to:

• Automatically capture areas of agreement/disagreement
• Group topics
• Select quotes for publication
• Build maps by emotion, frequency, significance
• Create real-time visual analysis of the discussion

Objective:
Unite opinions of a broad expert group on a multidisciplinary issue (biotherapy recommendations with conflicting/incomplete data) and develop a practical consensus.

Methods:

• 2 Delphi rounds (asynchronous, with digital feedback)
• Modular online Advisory Board
• AI-based analysis (heatmaps of disagreements)
• Insight Tracker for monitoring consensus statements

Our Support:

• Assembling and curating a multidisciplinary panel of 65 KOLs (rheumatology, gastroenterology, dermatology, immunology, etc.)
• Developing Delphi questionnaires with confidence grading and comments
• Preparing analytical dossiers and briefs for each expert
• Individual calls and briefings, support in slide and position note development
• Moderating live and asynchronous advisory board modules
• Creating interactive disagreement maps
• Facilitating publication and endorsement with five scientific societies

Why this combination:

Delphi is ideal for anonymous aggregation of independent expert opinions, especially in multidisciplinary settings. The modular format (2 sessions) allowed focus on disagreements, AI analysis between sessions, and consensus formulation.

Result:

• The final consensus was endorsed by five scientific societies and formed the basis for a CME program.
• The Insight Tracker ensured transparency and justification for each consensus statement, preserving the history of votes and comments.

Case: Hybrid Advisory Format with AI Platform for Ongoing Decision Support

Objective:
Create a long-term expert support system for a company entering a new therapeutic area—not just to get initial recommendations, but to establish a mechanism for ongoing KOL feedback as new questions arise.

Methods:

• Initial in-person advisory board to identify key knowledge gaps
• Asynchronous modular advisory board with AI support: platform for submitting questions and receiving expert responses (text/audio/video)
• Automated aggregation of opinions

Our Support:

• Development and management of the AI platform for asynchronous communication
• Preparation of background materials: literature reviews, clinical digests, competitor profiles
• Creation of a template library for rapid response
• Expert support: annotated materials, answer formatting tips, preparation of visuals and slides
• Platform curation: topic moderation, reminders, summary editing

Why this combination:
This format creates a flexible, sustainable mechanism where experts are not “one-time participants” but engage in a deep, ongoing dialogue with the company.
Asynchronous format + AI is not only time-saving but also enables accumulation, synthesis, and tracking of expert perspectives over time.

Result:

• The company gained a reliable tool for regular KOL feedback on key issues in the new therapeutic area.
• Time from question to expert opinion was reduced by more than half.
• Peer review and AI analytics enhanced the depth, accuracy, and substantiation of recommendations.

Objective:
Evaluate the market prospects of an innovative drug at the critical go/no-go decision stage by applying strategic foresight methodologies to anticipate future opportunities and risks.

Methods:
Strategic foresight workshop — an in-person session applying scenario analysis, future market SWOT, influence mapping, and PESTEL assessment.

Our Support:

• Prepared detailed scenario narratives covering a range of plausible futures (baseline, optimistic, disruptive)
• Selected and organized a multidisciplinary expert panel representing three key geographies and four functional areas: marketing, RWE, KOL, access
• Developed workshop materials, including strategic questions designed to challenge assumptions and provoke insight
• Moderated and facilitated interactive scenario-based sessions
• Visualized key risk and opportunity points
• Compiled a comprehensive analytical report summarizing key hypotheses and their robustness across scenarios

Why this combination:

A foresight session format allows moving beyond current data limitations to evaluate the system’s readiness for the product, taking into account trends, competitors, market access barriers, and strategic uncertainties. This approach is especially important when entering a new niche with a high degree of risk.

Result:

• The company decided against launching the drug (no-go), thereby avoiding significant investments in marketing and infrastructure.
• The insights generated formed the basis for R&D pipeline strategy refinement and molecule repositioning.

Want to discuss which format would work best for your challenge?
Let’s connect and brainstorm together.

Best regards,
Yakov Pakhomov
MD, PhD | Medical Director Medical Advisers Group

yakov@mdwrt.com | WhatsApp | LinkedIn

Bonus: And as always—a few films to inspire your next Advisory Board 😊