CMI Media Group, the Philadelphia-based healthcare media agency, has launched a specialized Rare Disease Center of Excellence aimed at helping pharmaceutical clients market therapies to small, hard-to-find patient populations. The agency, a WPP company, says it has worked on more than 67 rare disease brand launches, and points to a real shift in the industry driving demand for this kind of specialized work: nearly half of new FDA drug approvals now involve orphan or rare disease conditions, a figure that lines up with federal reporting showing roughly half of the FDA’s 46 novel drug approvals in 2025 were for rare diseases.
Why Rare Disease Marketing Doesn’t Work Like Regular Pharma Marketing
CMI’s pitch centers on a basic mismatch: most pharmaceutical marketing is built for scale, reaching broad physician and patient populations, while rare disease drugs need the opposite, precise identification of the small number of patients and specialists who actually match a narrow clinical profile. Dr. Susan Dorfman, CMI Media Group’s President and CEO, put it directly: “Rare diseases require a fundamental shift in strategic planning, you aren’t looking for mass scale, you’re finding ‘needles in a haystack.’” She framed the new practice as an attempt to close a gap she sees in how agencies typically serve this market: “Clients shouldn’t have to choose between a high-touch boutique agency that understands their therapeutic nuances and a large network with buying power and advanced data infrastructure. Our Rare Disease COE brings the best of both worlds to lower time-to-diagnosis and drive meaningful outcomes for patients.” The practice covers nephrology, oncology, ophthalmology, cardiology, hematology, immunology, pulmonology, and rheumatology, and leans on claims data analysis, procedure code mapping, specialty pharmacy data integration, and referral pathway identification to find patients who might otherwise go undiagnosed for years.
Bringing Patients Into the Process, Not Just the Marketing
CMI paired the launch with a partnership with Bionews’ Patient Advisory Board, an effort to fold real patient input into how the agency approaches messaging and outreach. Tanita Allen, a Bionews-affiliated rare disease patient, advocate, and health and wellness coach, MA, living with Huntington’s disease, described why that input matters to her: “As someone living with Huntington’s disease, I know that words matter. I appreciate when organizations truly listen to the rare disease community and use our feedback to create meaningful change. Being heard is important, but seeing that feedback put into action is what makes patient advocacy feel truly impactful.” For an industry that has occasionally been criticized for talking about patients more than to them, folding a formal patient advisory relationship directly into a new practice launch is a notable structural choice rather than just marketing language.
A WPP Agency Rooted in Philadelphia
CMI Media Group operates as a WPP company (NYSE: WPP) within the advertising giant’s healthcare-focused roster, but the agency’s day-to-day work and this launch both trace back to Philadelphia, where CMI is headquartered. It’s a reminder that the region’s life sciences ecosystem isn’t limited to the drug developers and diagnostics companies themselves, the marketing and commercialization infrastructure that gets those therapies in front of the right doctors and patients is its own significant slice of the local industry, and rare disease work in particular increasingly depends on exactly the kind of data-driven precision targeting CMI is now formalizing into a dedicated practice.
