Prolifiq and EthicsPoint Announce Partnership: `Automatic Alerts´ Help Life Sciences Engage in Good Promotional Practices
Prolifiq Software Inc. is on pace to match last year’s 52 percent revenue growth by selling sales communication software to high-tech and digital media companies.
Now CEO Jeff Gaus has his sites on the life sciences space. He believes his company’s software can help pharmaceutical and medical device companies avoid costly mistakes caused by running afoul of federal Food & Drug Adminstration marketing guidelines.
Gaus believes the move into a $400 billion industry will turn his $3.2 million, 30-employee Beaverton company into a 200-person, international business with $50 million in revenue.
And that’s just in the next three years.
Some of those expectations are borne from fortuitous timing.
Prolifiq has been dipping its toes into the life science space for the past year. It unveiled its life sciences product at a regulatory affairs trade show about a week after Pfizer Inc. and a subsidiary agreed to pay $2.3 billion to settle charges that it illegally promoted certain drugs.
“If I could have picked (the timing), I couldn’t have done it much better,” Gaus said.
While drugs or other medical products might have a multitude of applications, the FDA prohibits the marketing of products for anything other than their approved uses.
It has always been tricky territory for medical-related sales operations. Then came Pfizer, which was the largest so-called “off-label” settlement on record.
“There’s a lot more concern since the Pfizer settlement,” said John Mack, publisher of online trade publication Pharma Marketing News based in New Town, Pa.
Steven E. Skwara, a litigation attorney with the Washington, D.C., firm Epstein Baker & Green PC who primarily represents health care clients, said companies in the life sciences space need to be vigilant, “perhaps more than any other business.
“In a lot of these cases, in the investigations, some of the so-called evidence will be the promotional materials,” Skwara said. “Some of it might be problematic for various reasons. They might not have been vetted and given to the wrong people.”
That’s where Prolifiq comes in.
The company launched in the late ’90s during the dot-com bubble with a plan to incorporate rich media content into university e-mail systems using an advertising-supported model.
It was financed by $4 million in venture capital, the majority from Oregon investors.
Gaus said the company quickly realized that model wasn’t going to work and in 2002 shifted gears.
Starting with high-tech clients like Cisco Systems, the company developed communication software to allow sales representatives to more easily include corporate brand images and company-approved marketing materials into e-mail and text communications without the use of bulky attachments.
The company later moved into the digital media space, first serving photo archiving company Getty Images with the idea that the company’s client communication should logically incorporate Getty’s pictures.
Today, Prolifiq also works with other media outlets including Corbis Corp., the Associated Press and the British Broadcasting Corp.
A year ago the company was approached by Cincinnati-based medical device company AtriCure Inc., which was looking for a way to control marketing content related to unapproved uses of products.