The Deck That Went Nowhere

Somewhere inside a pharmaceutical company there is a slide deck that took a year to make. The science was checked. The language was negotiated. The boxes lined up. Then the people in the field did not use it. This story, told by a Kinetix strategist about an earlier assignment, is more revealing than the usual agency boast. It contains the small tragedy of modern medical communications: a thing can be accurate, expensive in human effort and beautifully delivered, yet fail at the moment it is supposed to become useful.

Kinetix Health Group exists because two agencies came to see that problem from opposite sides. MedComms Experts, founded in Zurich in 2012, had built its reputation in rigorous scientific communications and Medical Affairs, especially in rare disease. NexGen Healthcare Communications, founded in London a year later, brought medical education, patient engagement, commercial thinking and multichannel creative work. In July 2025, MedComms Experts acquired NexGen. In August 2026, after a year of integration, the pair appeared under one name: Kinetix.

The financial terms were not published. The strategic logic was. Pharma companies had accumulated content, digital platforms, field teams and data, but those things often behaved like neighbors who never learned one another's names. Kinetix would sell the introduction.

Diagnosis before deliverables

The ordinary agency brief begins with a noun: a deck, a video, a congress booth, an e-learning module. Kinetix wants to begin with a question. Which clinician is this for? What does that person already believe? What decision are they trying to make? What prevents the science from becoming useful at that moment?

This sounds painfully obvious, which is usually a sign that an industry has found it difficult to do. A community oncologist seeing a first patient on a therapy does not need the same argument as a trial investigator who has lived with the molecule for years. A physician in rural India may practice without a diagnostic tool assumed by a plan written at global headquarters. A medical science liaison needs material that survives a real conversation, not merely a review meeting.

“The ambition has never been the problem. The methodology has.”Wesley Portegies, founder and chief strategy officer

The company's answer is a five-part loop. Diagnose the audience. Frame the narrative. Create field-ready material. Enable the people who will carry it. Measure what happened. An intelligence layer, including AI-assisted audience insight and content analysis, is meant to feed the last observation back into the first decision.

Kinetix packages the work into four “Growth Engines.” Scientific Momentum builds an evidence audit, narrative and modular content system. Field Medical Navigator focuses on consistent field conversations. Digital Engagement Accelerator connects channels to a central HCP destination. MedInfo Catalyst treats medical-information questions not as tickets to close but as clues to what clinicians are struggling to understand. The names are polished, but the services underneath are recognizable: strategy, scientific writing, training, platforms, content, analytics and the patient coordination required to make them behave as one program.

The PDF that learned to listen

The useful test of an operating model is not whether its arrows make a circle. It is whether people do something differently. One Kinetix case study begins with a specialty-pharma company whose field team distributed PDFs while clinicians mostly tuned out. The replacement was a centralized education platform covering nine therapy areas, organized around different audience needs rather than one stream of material.

Sessions rose 41 percent, new users 105 percent and the engagement rate reached 49 percent. The program later received a 2025 Digital Health Awards Gold honor. Those numbers do not prove that a clinician made a better decision, a distinction Kinetix itself would insist upon. They do show that the audience entered the room and stayed longer than before. In communications, attention is not the outcome, but it is the door.

Another project took phase-three data presented at an international congress and made it available through publication extenders on a Science Hub. QR codes, social posts and physical cards helped visitors find the material. External traffic to the hub rose tenfold during the two weeks after the event. The surprising detail is physical: people stood up in the room to scan the code. The abstract funnel acquired legs.

A service company disguised as a flywheel

Kinetix is not a drug maker and it is not principally a software company. It is a privately held, business-to-business services firm for pharma and biotech. Its buyers sit in Medical Affairs, scientific communications, commercial teams and patient advocacy. They hire it for direct execution or to build capability inside their own organization. Pricing is private; so are the amount of Brydon's February 2025 investment and the price paid for NexGen.

That matters because the model is labor-intensive. Kinetix reports 120 scientists, strategists and creatives across London, Zurich and New York, with more than 1,000 inherited engagements. Its client list is largely confidential, as is normal in regulated agency work. Public case studies identify global healthcare and specialty-pharma companies but usually not their names. The expertise sits in oncology, rare disease, immunology, dermatology, women's health and other therapeutic areas, along with publication planning, congresses, medical education and digital engagement.

The competitive set ranges from specialist agencies to large networks such as OPEN Health, Real Chemistry, Inizio Medical, Envision Pharma Group, Avalere Health and SCIRIS. Kinetix's difference is not that it can make a manuscript, train a field team or build a digital hub. Many rivals can. The pitch is that one team can connect those tasks and keep the learning between them. Fewer handoffs. Less context evaporation.

What is worth stealing

The most copyable part of Kinetix is not a product name. It is the order of operations. Pick one priority audience. Ask field colleagues what that audience actually says and does. Describe the decision the communication should improve. Only then choose the format. Build the content in modules so local teams can adapt it. Train the people who will use it. Connect channels to one measurable destination. Use the results as intelligence, not as a school grade.

The approach has limits. It needs access to audience insight, cooperation across teams, compliant ways to observe engagement and enough time to revise. It will do little for a buyer who wants a single asset by Friday and refuses to revisit the brief. It can also break when headquarters treats local variation as an inconvenience or when a company counts clicks but cannot investigate understanding. Integration is not an aesthetic. It is permission for one part of an organization to learn from another.

The forgotten deck is therefore more than a cautionary tale. It is the unit economics of wasted attention: months of expert work multiplied by zero field use. Kinetix has made a company out of moving that zero. Not with louder claims, but by asking the impolite question before production begins: who, exactly, is going to use this?