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Sara Zelkovic on Building Patient-Centric Communications Strategies

How can pharma companies build marketing and communications strategies that truly put patients first? 

Sara Zelkovic is a communications leader with more than a decade of experience supporting life sciences and biotech organizations through critical growth milestones. As Associate Director of Research and Development Communications at Astellas, she leads global scientific communication strategy and drives engagement across the company’s gene and cell therapy portfolios.

In this episode, Sara joins Kristen to talk about what patient-centricity actually looks like in the day-to-day work of communications.

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Watch the full episode here or listen to it on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
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The Big Idea: Patient-Centricity Is More Than a Slogan

For Sara, patient-centricity shows up in how a company actually works with patients and patient organizations. In her experience, that work centers on advocacy and education—especially regarding rare diseases, where a single piece of communication might be the first time someone has ever heard of the condition. 

Sarah’s approach is to partner with patient organizations to amplify what they want to say, anchored by clear objectives and plenty of active listening. Internally, she points to a practice that consistently moves the needle: bringing patients and caregivers in to speak with employees directly, which keeps the work tethered to the people it’s aiming to serve.

"Active listening is really important because you are there to help amplify a story, but you're not trying to take over that story or embed your own part of industry too much."
Sara Zelkovic
Associate Director of Research and Development Communications at Astellas

Key Takeaways

  • Patient-centricity is a practice, not a positioning statement. Companies differentiate themselves through how they actually work with patients and patient organizations— through advocacy, education, and sustained collaboration.

  • In rare disease, communications often function as first-touch education. Many of the conditions Sara works on are ones the average person has never heard of, which means a single piece of content may be someone’s introduction to the disease itself.

  • Bringing patients and caregivers in to speak directly to employees drives high internal engagement, reconnecting teams to the purpose of the work.

  • Active listening protects the integrity of patient stories. Communicators are there to amplify, not to take over. Grounding every story in a clear objective keeps industry from becoming too much of the narrative itself.

  • Empathy is closer to understanding than to sympathy. It comes from the specific, day-to-day details—the planning, the equipment, the extra mental load—that define what living with a condition actually looks like.

  • Translating complex science is a skill. Scientists can get so deep in the material that the message gets lost. Communicators bring an outsider’s ear that helps surface what the audience actually needs to hear.

Ways to Connect with Sara

If you’d like to connect with Sara, you can do so here:

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