Data released earlier this month showed that across nearly 600 cancer patient groups, Roche was rated as having the best reputation among pharmas in 2023. Now, PatientView has offered an even deeper dive into those findings, breaking out patient sentiments by several cancer types.
The newest wave of survey results (PDF) homes in on groups representing patients with blood, breast, lung and prostate cancers, which together made up almost half of the 570 groups surveyed and are among the world’s most common forms of cancer.
When asked about pharmas they were familiar with, their answers differed—sometimes dramatically—from those of the overall group, which ranked Roche first, followed by AstraZeneca and then Pfizer. Only the lung cancer patient groups surveyed matched that exact top three; each of the other specialties left at least one of those pharmas off their own top three lists.
Breast cancer groups, for example, kept Roche in the top spot, but sent AstraZeneca down to No. 3 and elevated Novartis to the second slot, while blood cancer groups bumped Roche to their third spot, outranked by Janssen—now known as Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine—and Novartis, in that order. Meanwhile, Roche didn’t make the top three at all among prostate cancer patients, who instead ranked Janssen, Bayer and Pfizer as having the best reputations among other major drugmakers.
Those type-specific rankings held fairly steady when members of the groups were asked about pharmas that they’d worked with, rather than just those they were familiar with. Blood cancer patients kept their ranking intact, and both the breast and prostate cancer groups maintained the same top three, albeit in jumbled order. Only the lung cancer patients switched things up, swapping Merck & Co. into the third spot on their list over Pfizer.
The findings mark a slight shake-up compared to the last time PatientView broke out the results of its cancer patient group survey by type, in 2022 (PDF). At that time, Roche only made the top-three lists for breast and lung cancer patients. The latter ranked it first, followed by Takeda and Pfizer, while breast cancer groups went Pfizer, Roche, Novartis. Among blood and prostate cancer patients, Janssen again took the top spot, followed by AbbVie and Pfizer for the former and Pfizer and Astellas for the latter.
When asked about the pharma industry as a whole, the four specialties highlighted were somewhat more optimistic than the overall group surveyed.
For example, while 63% of the total group of cancer patients rated pharma’s corporate reputation as “excellent” or “good,” patients with blood, breast and lung cancers all went higher, topping out at the lung cancer subtype’s 75%. Only prostate cancer groups rated the industry’s reputation slightly lower, with 59% saying it was “excellent” or “good.”
That trend largely continued when the patients were asked about pharma’s abilities to innovate and to provide new products but their sentiments shifted somewhat when asked about the industry’s ability to set fair pricing. Among all surveyed, a mere 15% rated it as “excellent” or “good,” a percentage approximately matched by those with prostate and breast cancers, while only 5% of blood cancer patients and 8% of lung cancer patients agreed.