Place, Franklin Park 08823. John Fitzgerald, vice president, creative

director. 732-422-2559; fax, 732-422-2558. Home page:

www.theworksinc.com

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Princeton Autism Tech Nonprofit

Ron Oberleitner tells of the football celebrity whose

autistic brother didn’t communicate until he was 35, but when he was

able to type his thoughts, his first words were, "I am not stupid,

I understand everything." Oberleitner’s nine year old son has

a similar disability; he has autism and lost much of his ability to

communicate.

Oberleitner’s nine-year-old son must commute to a Cherry Hill school

because there is no room at Eden Institute or Princeton Child

Development

Institute, two prominent Princeton area private schools for those

with autism. "My little buddy gets on a bus for an hour and a

half every morning. It does nothing for his education. It’s where

technology can change things," says Oberleitner.

So after 14 years of marketing medical devices at Pfizer, Oberleitner

has founded a nonprofit organization, Princeton Autism Technology,

so that those affected by autism can link up with such 21st century

resources as chat groups and telemedicine. This move came after going

on a 6,700-mile cross-country cycling campaign to raise awareness

and money for autism research. "I was bicycling with a police

officer, every time he talked about his son, he cried, and he made

me cry. When I got off of the bike trip, it changed my direction,"

he says. "I saw the needs we had for the community.

"Our mission is to assist the autism community by being the one

place to find many resources, and to assist in connecting people to

other expert sites," says Oberleitner, a graduate of University

of Notre Dame, Class of 1985. He and his wife, Sharon, have two older

children, ages 10 and 16, and Sharon works from their home to help

start up the nonprofit.

A web-based service, TalkAutism, is a turnkey technology and service

for autism organizations to share knowledge, information, and

assistance.

Like Mapquest, it can be embedded in an organization’s website.

Telephone

and mail support can be an option.

One goal of TalkAutism is to build a database of the autism community

that will be used as a registry to help obtain more dollars toward

services, education, and research. It will also provide users with

a resource to locate professionals, services, and products, and it

will have a customers’ testimony feature.

Requests for help that formerly languished in someone’s inbox could

be referred to the TalkAutism website, says Joe Guzzardo of National

Alliance for Autism Research at Research Park. "We get calls from

families all over the country asking us to hook them up with schools

and other families, so we look forward to building a relationship

with TalkAutism."

The nonprofit has received a $10,000 in-kind grant from Global MedNet,

a Pfizer vendor, to seed the web programming. "Otherwise it

wouldn’t

have gotten off the ground," says Oberleitner.

Oberleitner supports his family with his for-profit consulting

business,

Emerge Medical Marketing, a market development company for new medical

devices — surgical implants or surgical instruments. He was

particularly

successful with a contract with Edison-based Doctors Research Group

to market the industry’s most expensive new stethoscope, which sells

for $125 to $750. His marketing plan leveraged the information that

the stethoscope’s inventors had had input from a prominent audio

components

firm. "And when the doctors heard this, they were totally sold

on the superiority of the stethoscope’s acoustics."

Oberleitner is meeting with representatives from the University of

Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey to work on telemedicine

applications.

In particular he is looking at how a multimedia distance learning

program might help those with autism who live in remote places.

"Our

kids gravitate to multimedia — our kids teach us a lot," says

Oberleitner.

A neurological disorder, autism is particularly frustrating because

it affects toddlers who seem otherwise normal until the disease sets

in. Says Oberleitner: "You wouldn’t believe how many people have

reached out from all different areas to lend a hand."

Princeton 08540. Ron Oberleitner, founder. 609-430-0290; fax,

609-430-1701.

E-mail: rono@emergetechservices.com Home page: www.talkautism.org.

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New Media Partners

New Media Partners positions itself as the production

arm for companies that do continuing medical education. It offers

cost effective presentations, both computer based, Web-based, or

CD-ROM-based

— PowerPoint, monographs, audio tapes, audio production, and

speaker

kits. "We add excitement to presentations, and we import

PowerPoint

into programs that allow you to add video and use other multimedia

techniques," says Gary LaSasso, the president.

On May 1 New Media Partners nearly doubled its space from Princeton

Meadows Office Center to 3131 Princeton Pike, Building 2, Suite 101.

"We went from a living room to 800 feet to more than 1,500 feet

in three years," says LaSasso.

Recently, for a New Jersey-based agency that works with a German

luxury

car company, the firm completed six training modules, ranging from

six to twenty minutes, plus testing and certification, all available

on an intranet. For the agency of a big pharmaceutical client, they

completed a four-module training program, complete with voice over

narration, "screen grabs" to walk employees through the steps

to complete certain forms, a "screen cam," and "show

me"

and "try me" segments.

"They developed the content and we did the production work,"

says LaSasso. "Ultimately it saves money for the client because

it reduces training costs."

2, Suite 101, Lawrenceville 08648. Gary LaSasso, president.

609-895-0300;

fax, 609-895-8118. Home page: www.nmpartners.net

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Simstar Internet: Online Marketing

If it is true, as AOL claims, that American women are

spending 16 hours a week online and that they mostly investigate

healthcare

— well, online drug marketing is going to get more important by

the day.

"There is more and more influence of the Internet on the health

care marketing mix, and we provide clients with a turbo charger to

the rest of the marketing program," says Rob Rebak, president

of Carnegie Center-based Simstar Internet Solutions, which provides

strategy, development, and servicing of E-business solutions for the

pharmaceutical industry. With 95 employees, it has 30,000 feet of

space at the Carnegie Center and 11 of the top 20 blue chip

pharmaceuticals

as its clients (U.S. 1, May 23, 2001).

Simstar’s trademarked tool and methodology system, Combinatorial

E-Marketing

(CEM), looks at different permutations of messages that could affect

behavioral change — whether a patient chooses a particular drug

and whether the patient complies with the drug’s treatment regime.

The CEM name implies "speed" because it evokes how

combinatorial

chemists can come up with new compounds so much faster than the old

way. CEM uses various customer relationship management platforms to

do personalization, content management, analysis, reporting, and

campaign

management.

"We have developed pharmaceutical-specific segmentation to serve

up the `next best piece of content’ that will best influence

behavior,"

says Rebak. "Then we track that to refine it, both in real time

and — offline — for analytics. Sometimes we make major

overhauls

to the initiatives."

"Ninety-five percent of the visitors to a pharmaceutical website

don’t want to volunteer information, so we are tracking individual

patients in an anonymous way," says Rebak. Take www.EffexorXR.com,

the site for Wyeth’s depression and anxiety drug. Like Amazon.com,

it starts to talk to you and react to you as you click on certain

areas. If the site determines that you might be a man, your next click

will bring up a male picture and language. "We serve as the

Internet

channel for that relationship."

"Instead of hard coding content on a static site, we create

thousands

of chunks of content, dynamically served up, based on what the

individual

is doing on the website. The content becomes more and more valuable

as it is tied to the real-time effort to influence behavior,"

he says.

Princeton 08540. David Reim, CEO. 609-378-0100; fax, 609-378-0220.

Home page: www.simstar.com

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Interlink Healthcare: Banner Ads For MDs

Interlink Healthcare Communications tends not to

differentiate

the interactive portion of its business from the more traditional

print and electronic work. Formerly known as Integrated Communications

Corp. (the name of the parent company in Parsippany), this full

service

medical advertising agency was founded in 1985. It is part of Lowe

Healthcare Worldwide and the Interpublic Group of Companies. The Lenox

Drive office has 150 employees and specializes in cardiovascular and

diabetes product advertising.

"We feel the Web has become so mainstream that E-solutions are

a natural and necessary part of launching and supporting a brand,"

says Lou Davelman, vice president and director of E-Solutions at the

Lenox Drive-based firm.

Davelman has been specializing in E-newsletters and animated banner

advertising aimed at healthcare professionals. He is preparing banner

ads for Medscape, a site frequented by healthcare professionals, to

drive physician traffic to the site of big pharma that has just

entered

the E-commerce marketplace. The purpose of these banner ads is to

make it convenient for the physicians to purchase a particular drug

online.

"There is an unmistakable trend towards using the web for reaching

both healthcare professionals and patients. This will only accelerate

as broadband becomes more pervasive and technologies such as rich

media begin to dominate online advertising," he says.

Drive, Suite 300, Lawrenceville 08648. Larry J. Iaquinto, president.

609-406-9600; fax, 609-406-9046. Home page:

www.interlinkhc.com.

Top Of Page
Market MeasuresCozint

Before the Internet came along, telephone response was

state-of-the-art for market research in the pharmaceutical industry.

Physicians agreed to sit at a phone and put in their responses to

the survey using a keypad, sometimes responding verbally to a tape.

Mail or faxed surveys were also used. That has almost been replaced

by the Web-based solution: To E-mail doctors and get responses that

way.

Two companies that sell primary market research to the pharmaceutical

industry — Cozint Interactive and Market Measures — have

combined

and work in the Internet market research space. In January Princeton’s

branch of Cozint Interactive was bought by Market Measures, which

already had a branch on Palmer Square, and the company is now known

as Market Measures Cozint. The parent company of Market Measures

Cozint

is NOP World which in turn is owned by United Business Media, a

U.K.-based

conglomerate. NOP World also owns RoperASW on Route 206.

The Cozint side has moved from 199 Nassau Street (now the home of

the Henderson family’s Princeton Real Estate Group) to Bear Tavern

Road and has grown to 30 people. Between the two offices, says Cindy

Blodgett, executive vice president, there are from 25 to 30 employees,

and within the next three months they will move to a space that can

hold both of them.

Market Measures is known for its long-term syndicated studies on

therapeutic

areas (such as asthma and cardiovascular disease) and also did

research

on promotional effectiveness. The results from these studies can be

tailored to the needs of various pharmaceutical firms.

Cozint, in contrast, focused on custom market research and quick

turnaround

(U.S. 1, November 1, 2000). It might do a quick study of the marketing

opportunities for a potential product. Or try out the effectiveness

of a marketing program. And if a drug gets bad press, the client might

requisition an extra speedy survey in order to publish an

"antidote"

the very next day.

"We believe our doctor panel — 41,000 doctors in all

therapeutic

areas — is one of the largest in the industry," says Blodgett.

The firm also recruits from the 750,000 doctors in the American

Medical

Association files. It also has a strategic alliance with Hippocrates,

a company offers access to drug information using a Palm or Personal

Digital Assistant (PDA).

For participating, the doctors (termed "knowledge providers")

get an honorarium equivalent to what they would earn if they were

using that time to see a patient, from $100 to $125 for a 30-minute

survey.

Suite 303, Ewing 08628. Cindy Blodgett, executive vice president.

609-883-6800; fax, 609-883-5943. Home page:

www.marketmeasurescozint.com

Suite 330, Princeton 08542. Donna Famoso, research vice president.

609-688-0540; fax, 609-688-0542. Home page:

www.mmi-research.com

Top Of Page
PharmaPros: Knowledge Database

PharmaPros does clinical data management and regulatory

technology and works with clinical research organizations to develop

the clinical protocol, to get a study running, and to do technical

support, re-engineering, and reporting.

Just launched: a new web-based system for managing clinical trials.

Called NCompass, it will be available by subscription to both early

stage biotechnology and device companies and large pharmaceutical

companies.

"Before NCompass, small to mid-sized companies or departments

of large companies running small trials and contract research

organizations

(CROs) struggled with balancing the resources required to implement

and maintain major clinical data management systems (CDMs)," says

Peg Regan, PharmaPro’s CEO. "In the case of companies looking

to run only few or generally small studies, it can be more cost

effective

to obtain the technology and support on an outsourced, subscription

basis."

Customers need only provide the study protocol, clinical report forms,

and other requirements, and their system can be implemented in six

to eight weeks, compared to the one or two years required to develop

an in-house system.

NCompass includes the infrastructure needed to support the clinical

study, including Phase Forward’s CDM software from Clintrial, a

leading

clinical data management software. It also has PharmaPros’ proprietary

clinical report form tracking and data validation software. Accessible

through the Web, it allows customers to set up electronic clinical

data management centers anywhere instantly.

Lawrenceville

08648. Peg Regan, president. 609-912-1100; fax, 609-912-1120. Home

page: www.pharmapros.com

Corrections or additions?

— the web site for U.S. 1 Newspaper in Princeton, New Jersey.