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Key opinion leaders — a critical perspective

Nature Reviews Rheumatology volume 17, pages 119–124 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Enormous progress has been made in the field of rheumatology in the past several decades, historically led by publicly funded academic innovators but in more recent times with much greater involvement of the pharmaceutical industry. This shift in resources has created a complex new model for reinvestment in the medical community in which the vast majority of private funds are redirected towards influencing the prescription behaviour of practitioners through ‘key opinion leaders’, with the main purpose of enhancing and perpetuating profit rather than innovation and critical thinking, and often at the expense of partnerships with scientists (that is, basic and translational researchers) and academic collaborations. This new episteme brings multiple opportunities to rethink approaches to sustaining long-term critical research in the field, ultimately maximizing the return on investment: scientific knowledge for the benefit of patients and society. Central to such strategies should be the rebalancing of academia–industry partnerships towards academic research and the involvement of ‘innovation and knowledge leaders’, rather than mostly key opinion leaders.

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Fig. 1: Proposed Schett–Scher diagram for academia–industry collaboration.

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Acknowledgements

J.U.S. is supported by the NIH (NIAMS R01AR074500). J.U.S. is further supported by The Riley Family Foundation, The Beatriz Snyder Foundation, the Rheumatology Research Foundation and the National Psoriasis Foundation. G.S. is supported by the German Research Council (DFG: FOR2886; SFB1181), the German Ministry of Science and Education (project MASCARA), the European Union (ERC Synergy grant 4DnanoSCOPE) and the EU/EFPIA Innovative Medicines Initiative 2 (project RTCure).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Medicine, Division of Rheumatology, NYU Grossman School of Medicine, New York, NY, USA

    Jose U. Scher

  2. Department of Internal Medicine, Rheumatology and Immunology, Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg and Universitätsklinikum Erlangen, Erlangen, Germany

    Georg Schett

Authors
  1. Jose U. Scher
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  2. Georg Schett
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Contributions

Both authors researched data for the article and substantially contributed to discussion of content, writing and review/editing of the manuscript before submission.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Jose U. Scher or Georg Schett.

Ethics declarations

Competing interests

J.U.S. declares that he has served as a consultant for Janssen, Novartis, Pfizer, Sanofi and UCB, and has received funding for investigator-initiated studies from Novartis, Sanofi and Janssen. G.S. has served as a consultant for Abbvie, BMS, Eli Lilly, Gilead, GSK Novartis, Janssen and Roche and has received funding for investigator-initiated studies from BMS, Eli Lilly, GSK, Novartis and UCB.

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Nature Reviews Rheumatology thanks I. Adamopoulos, J. Katz and W. Lipworth for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Industry–University Cooperative Research Centers Program (IUCRC): https://iucrc.nsf.gov

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Scher, J.U., Schett, G. Key opinion leaders — a critical perspective. Nat Rev Rheumatol 17, 119–124 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41584-020-00539-1

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