Digital Pharma: Merck Serono expands PKU website
pharmafile | March 16, 2010 | News story | Medical Communications | Kuvan, Merck Serono, PKU
Merck Serono has expanded its European phenylketonuria disease awareness website, adding versions in French and Spanish.
The website was originally launched in English last November and the company plans to add further European languages, including German and Italian, later this year.
The site contains information for parents of newborn babies, families with young children, teenagers and young people, and adults with phenylketonuria (PKU).
The genetic disorder affecting approximately 50,000 diagnosed patients in the developed world and occurs when the body fails to break down an essential amino acid called Phenylalanine (Phe), which can be found in protein-rich food.
Newborn screening efforts implemented in the 1960s and early 1970s sees virtually all PKU patients in developed countries diagnosed at birth.
Merck’s Kuvan was launched in Europe last year and is the only licensed treatment for PKU.
The expansion of the disease awareness site tackles a key problem for European pharma, how to bridge the continent’s linguistic variety, but it also suggests a comparison with its US counterpart.
A tale of two websites
The US version of the website is run by Merck Serono’s Kuvan partner BioMarin and offers a marked contrast to the European site.
Billed as a ‘community’ for PKU patients, it’s brighter, bolder and feature-heavy, with patient blogs, a forum and even sharing of photo albums.
Logged-in users have access to Facebook-like functionality that allows them to connect with other users, exchange messages, participate in chat rooms and add apps.
Whether any of these community functions will come to Europe remains to be seen, although when launching the European site last year Merck Serono did refer to plans for its site to be “enriched with new tools”.
The site opens up a number of interesting questions around patient communities and language in Europe:
• Are bespoke patient communities the best way for pharma to engage online or should companies work with established communities instead?
• The more languages you make health material available in, the easier it is for patients from different countries and backgrounds to access it. But how far should pharma go to make material available in other languages beyond the web’s lingua franca of English?
What do you think? Please login and leave a comment to share your views.
Dominic Tyer is web editor for Pharmafocus and InPharm.com and the author of the Digital Pharma blog He can be contacted via email, Twitter or LinkedIn.
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