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A new heartburn medicine plunges through the harsh environment of the stomach, maintaining its protective outer coating, until it reaches its goal and neatly blocks an acid-secreting pumping mechanism. For the effectiveness of this new medication, so elegantly depicted in an animated sequence by Hurd Studios, much depends upon the successful convergence of several divergent elements.
So too, the early success of Hurd Studios is explained in part by a serendipitous intersection of the staid Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the exploding West Coast animation industry.
“Two things were going on simultaneously in the early 1990s that helped bring us to this point,” explains Stephen J. Biale ’82, co-founder and CEO of Med Ed Solutions, the parent company of Hurd Studios. “The first was that the FDA began loosening its restrictions on direct marketing to consumers by the drug industry. The second was the digital revolution in which companies like Disney and Pixar began creating high-end, three-dimensional animation.”
Since 1998, Hurd Studios has parlayed these two factors into a breathtaking series of animated sequences for the top global pharmaceutical companies as well as for PBS and WebMD. And the national media is paying attention to the small company headquartered in Manhattan’s SoHo. It was highlighted as a major feature in Print magazine in January 2001, included in the February 2003 issue of FSB (Fortune Small Business) magazine, and aired as a CNN segment in April 2003.
“Up until very recently, the method used by pharmaceutical companies to communicate with physicians was primarily print-based – books and journals,” says Biale. “With the digital capabilities available now, we can bring that drug mechanism to life in a powerful animated sequence.”
A quick tour of the sample animations presented on Hurd Studio’s website sends the viewer speeding through the bloodstream with glucose molecules and dodging bristly bacteria in the urinary tract.
Using stop-frame, animation software, Hurd Studios illustrates the story of complex drug mechanisms in three to five minute sequences that “previously would have taken hundreds of pages of text to explain,” Biale says.
The images also lend themselves to PowerPoint presentations for medical conferences, patient video tutorials, still images for brochures and flash animation for web sites. Hurd Studios emphasizes these multiple uses when working with clients.
Biale’s path to helping co-found Med Ed Solutions began, in some ways, at Lafayette, where he majored in English.
“I found that my major really has helped in all aspects of business. It’s just been a great grounding,” he says. “I also took a lot of economics and business as well as art courses. I’ve always had a keen interest in art.”
And, as a college athlete – he co-captained the football team and was an Associated Press All-American in 1981– Biale was attuned to the physiology of his own body.
After graduation and a wrenched neck that ended his two-year professional football career, Biale accepted a position with Medical Economics Company, publisher of the venerable Physician’s Desk Reference and dozens of medical journals.
“My next job, with Physicians World Communications Group, really influenced the rest of my career,” he says. “I developed a series of creative communication tools for the pharmaceutical industry which, at that time, was still print-based.”
It was then that Biale began to fully explore the world of pharmaceutical marketing, where physicians, with their prescription pads and central role in patient education, have long been the primary audience. One technique used by drug companies to reach this highly select audience, is to publish scientific books about conditions and various drug mechanisms. Pharmaceutical representatives then distribute the books to physicians.
Biale’s next career stop was with Mosby-Wolfe Medical Communications Group where he established a highly successful U.S.-based custom publishing unit. This group went on to become the second most profitable unit of Mosby by its third year of business operations.
By the mid 1990s, though, Biale was beginning to think of founding his own business.
“I have always had an entrepreneurial urge percolating below the surface,” he says. “I knew an idea would present itself at some point.”
In 1996, Biale and Michael Tague founded Medical Education Solutions to develop specialized marketing programs for and consulting services to pharmaceutical companies. One of their earliest assignments was a high-profile, national patient education video project, Time Life Medical, spearheaded by former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop.
The venture didn’t come to fruition, however, as senior executives at Time Inc. ultimately called off the project.
A silver lining appeared, though, as the partners had already begun forging ties with several artists associated with Time Life Medical, most important among them the respected medical illustrator, Jane Hurd. Hurd became the third partner in 1998 when Med Ed Solutions formally became the parent company of Hurd Studios.
“Jane is a brilliant women from a creative as well as a business standpoint,” says Biale. “She and her staff can take subject matter that can be very complicated and gory to look at and produce beautifully engaging sequences that depict even the most complex concepts. What my partner and I brought to the equation as our understanding of and contacts in the pharmaceutical industry.”
Today, Hurd Studios occupies sleek offices, featured in Interior Design magazine, with a staff of about 25 “perfectionists,” says Biale. “We had sleeping cots built in.”
Still, Biale finds time to spend on the family horse farm that he shares with wife, Renae C. ’82, and daughter, Alexa. There one of his joys is collecting American landscape paintings because, as he points out, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”