While assessing patient perspectives in comprehensive drug and treatment analyses may sound like a contemporary issue, the Mapi Group has been a pioneer in the practice for over forty years. Mapi Chairman Bernard Jambon explains the importance of patient incorporation in drug and therapy evaluation and his ambitions to expand the company’s market research methods to new markets. Despite the contemporary nature of Mapi, we see that you created the company over 40 years ago. What is it that prompted you to found the Group? I began my career as a market research reporter in 1974. Soon after, I decided to launch my own market research company. We based the foundation of the company on gathering the opinions of clients for market research, which lends itself to the positioning of the company to this day. From global market research, I refined my focus to medical market research, and specifically to drug evaluation. In the beginning, drug safety and drug efficiency were the main points of assessment. At the time there was a new trend in academic circles for documenting patients’ self-reported measures of physical and mental health, a concept called Health-Related Quality of Life (HRQoL).

For over 25 years now, [Mapi] has been a pioneer, looking beyond simply safety and efficacy evaluations and developing technical expertise in gathering and assessing patient perspectives.