Role Summary

The Director of Patient Advocacy plays a crucial role in bridging the gap between the company, patients, and patient advocacy organizations. Reporting to the Senior Director of Patient Affairs, you will serve as a strategic connector between the patient community, advocacy landscape, and internal decision-makers to ensure patient experience meaningfully informs development, access, and commercialization strategy. This position is responsible for developing and implementing strategies that ensure patient perspectives are integrated into various stages of drug development, clinical trials, and market access initiatives. The role requires a deep understanding of the disease landscape, strong relationship-building skills, and a commitment to ethical and compliant patient engagement practices. This role will ensure that patient and caregiver perspectives meaningfully inform every stage of the product lifecycle, from early clinical development and endpoint selection through to commercialization and market access.

Primary Responsibilities

• Strategy Development and Execution: Lead the development and execution of patient advocacy strategies aligned with corporate objectives. This includes identifying key patient populations, understanding their needs and challenges, and creating impactful engagement plans.
• Strategic External Engagement: Build and nurture strong, long-term relationships with patient advocacy organizations, patient groups, caregivers, and key opinion leaders. Serve as a primary liaison between these external stakeholders and the company.
• Patient Insight Integration: Champion the integration of patient and caregiver insights across various internal teams, including Medical Affairs, Clinical Development, Commercial, Regulatory, and Market Access. Identify and translate patient and caregiver insights into actionable recommendations that inform clinical development, endpoint relevance, access strategy, and patient support initiatives. Ensure patient perspectives inform decision-making, strategy, and product development.
• Cross-functional Collaboration: Partnering with Clinical Operations, Medical Affairs, Marketing, and Commercial teams, as well as external Contract Research Organizations (CROs), to integrate patient-centric initiatives. Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure patient perspective is internally understood and incorporated into company culture and patient needs are considered at all stages of product development.
• Disease Awareness and Education: Partner cross-functionally to ensure patient education and engagement initiatives are informed by community needs, lived experience, and health literacy considerations, while fostering thoughtful collaboration with the advocacy community where appropriate.
• Operational Oversight: Managing operational processes for patient advocacy materials, including strategically managing budget and patient advocacy organization charitable donations/sponsorships.
• Policy and Access: Provide insights into health policy, access, and reimbursement trends to ensure patient organizations are well-informed and to help shape strategies that improve patient access to therapies.
• Legal, Compliance and Ethics: Ensure all patient engagement activities are conducted in accordance with regulatory and ethical guidelines. Serve as an internal subject-matter expert on best practices, regulations, and compliant partnership models.
• Team Leadership: Hire, develop, coach, and retain high performing patient advocacy team members

Job Description

Candidate Profile

Education and Required Skills

• 10+ years of experience in patient advocacy, patient engagement, patient affairs, or related functions within the biopharmaceutical industry, required. Experience in oncology and/or rare diseases, preferred.
• Experience working with non-profit organizations, preferred.
• Bachelor's degree in life sciences, healthcare, public health, or a related field, required.
• Strong interpersonal, communication, and collaboration skills are essential. A deep understanding of compliant patient engagement practices and the drug development lifecycle is critical.
• Experience leading and managing direct reports preferred

Travel and Location

• Remote position
• Ability to travel up to 40% of the time

Salary Range

The salary range for this role is $191-$230k. An employee's pay position within the salary range will be based on several factors including, but not limited to, relevant education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographic location, performance, and business or organizational needs. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range, and the range may be modified in the future. Employees in this position are also eligible for Short-Term and Long-Term incentive programs. Servier also offers a competitive and comprehensive benefits package that includes benefits such as medical, dental, vision, flexible time off (Servier provides unlimited sick time and flex time, and does not accrue time off), 401(k), life and disability insurance, recognition programs among other great benefits (all benefits are subject to eligibility requirements). For more information on our benefits, please visit this link.