Diane Weiser Leads the Way. The Communicator Who Bet on Patients – and Grew Alongside Them.
Long before Diane Weiser became a patient herself, she built a career helping life sciences companies communicate with humanity. For thirty years, spanning Burson-Marsteller, Ketchum, and more than a decade in leadership roles helping build W2O Group, now Real Chemistry, she advised companies from the outside, helping them find their voice, hold their story, and build trust with the audiences that mattered most. What she could not have anticipated was that her most formative chapter was still ahead of her. Her philosophy was simple and hard to argue with: reputation is not manufactured through messaging. It is earned through relationships. It is built through consistency, and it is deepened by showing up for patients.
In 2015, a persistent CEO gave her the chance to prove it from the inside. Cytokinetics was a muscle biology-focused biopharmaceutical company with a $6 stock, five Wall Street analysts, no approved products, and an ALS program whose fate was uncertain. Most communicators would have assessed the risk and passed. Diane assessed it and said yes. Eleven years later, the company has a market capitalization approaching $10 billion, more than twenty analysts, and its first FDA-approved product, MYQORZO for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, is on the market. It was a test of endurance that would come to define them both.
Pioneering a Different Approach
Diane understood something early that the industry would take years to catch up to: people connect emotionally before they connect clinically. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, while most pharmaceutical companies were still leading with data, she was quietly pioneering an approach to patient advocacy that would define her career.
There was Strike Out Cancer, a Major League Baseball partnership with Genentech that brought cancer awareness to ballparks across the country. There was Failure is Not an Option, a heart failure awareness campaign in collaboration with The American Heart Association, featuring Héctor Elizondo, developed for Scios before its acquisition by Johnson & Johnson. And there were the Lipitor campaigns, The Cholesterol Low Down and Touching Hearts with Regis Philbin, Dick Clark, Gladys Knight, Debbie Allen, and Olympia Dukakis, each bringing a familiar face and a human story to a conversation previously dominated by clinical language. Today, celebrity-driven health campaigns are standard practice. Back then, they were novel.
When she joined Cytokinetics, she brought that conviction with her and a philosophy she calls one voice communications: the idea that no matter who’s in the room, the story doesn’t change. Every message, to every audience, should be traceable back to the same truth. A through line that holds, especially when high-stakes news like clinical trial failures, Complete Response Letters and M&A speculation makes it harder to tell. At Cytokinetics, that philosophy was further solidified. The company’s deep commitment to science, along with its transparent culture and team, pushed Diane to apply her convictions more rigorously than ever.
From her earliest days shaping Cytokinetics’ Corporate Affairs strategy, Diane set about building a multi-disciplinary team to execute her vision, and further embedded patient advocacy into the fabric of the company in ways that went well beyond industry convention. It was a cross-functional partnership that reflects the company’s transparent culture. Patients now sit on every clinical trial steering committee, not symbolically but as substantive voices in trial design. Patient advisory councils meet continuously, weighing in on protocols, marketing materials, and packaging. A formal Patient Guided Decision-Making program ensures patient input is built into key business inflection points by design. And more recently, the company rolled out an immersive program called “Life in a Day,” putting employees in the shoes of an HCM patient for a full workday. Participants receive a diagnosis, navigate workplace conversations, and wear a device that simulates chest tightness. Every field sales representative will go through the patient journey.
None of this, Diane will tell you, is separate from the communications work. It is the communications work. And it is what held the company together through its hardest years. When Cytokinetics’ ALS program failed, the company did not walk away from that community. It continued to fund grants, support awareness, and show up, publishing a book about its ALS journey as an act of industry generosity, sharing hard-won lessons with the companies coming behind them.
Our CEO Robert often speaks to how our relationship with the patient community held us up and supported us through some of the toughest times, Diane says. Patients are not a strategy at Cytokinetics. They are the North Star.
Walking the Talk
For most healthcare communicators, the patient experience remains adjacent to the work, often taking a back seat to investor and media relations. For Diane, it eventually became her life.
In 2017, her husband suffered a traumatic brain injury, thrusting her into the role of caregiver while she continued leading her team professionally. She managed rehabilitation, treatment decisions, and fear, working remotely alongside his recovery. Several years later, she faced her own health crisis: a ruptured brain aneurysm that nearly killed her. “Thirty percent of people survive,” she says matter-of-factly. “And most are disabled in some way.” She spent six months on medical leave, rehabilitating herself and slowly rebuilding her confidence, supported throughout by her Cytokinetics team – whose culture of authenticity and care she needed now more than ever. Returning to work felt emotionally disorienting. “I remember thinking, where do I fit? Do I still have a role?”
She did. And survival, it turns out, changes what you know about patients in ways no campaign briefing can. “I had a second chance, really,” she says. “And it gave me a much stronger and deeper appreciation for the patient experience, for sure.” When her husband was later diagnosed with tongue cancer, standard of care called for radical surgery. Diane pushed back hard, advocating for chemotherapy and radiation instead. He is now a year in remission.
I’ve walked the talk in healthcare, she says. As a patient, as a caregiver, and as a professional. And I think it’s made me a better leader.
Diane learned the power of patient advocacy as both a practitioner and as someone who has been on the receiving end of that kind of leadership. After navigating setbacks, illness and reinvention at Cytokinetics, she works to pay it forward, mentoring the next generation of leaders with the same human-centric consistency and conviction she was shown.
Full Circle
Ten years after joining Cytokinetics, Diane finally got to bring her celebrity campaign playbook home. A key opinion leader mentioned a notable patient. That patient turned out to be Willie McLaughlin, a three-time All-American track star who suffered from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy for decades before receiving a life-saving heart transplant. Willie may not be a household name but his daughter, Olympic gold medalist Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, is and together, Diane saw the opportunity to elevate HCM in the national conversation. The result was On Track with HCM, a campaign addressing the whole-person impact of the disease: its emotional, psychological, and social dimensions. Not just what HCM does to a body, but what it does to a life.
It’s a full-circle moment for my career, she says. I brought something to this company that it had never done before, something near and dear to my heart, and something the HCM community really needed.
The company Diane joined from an “Aha” moment has become the company she always believed it could be. MYQORZO is gaining commercial traction in the US. A European launch is underway. The pipeline continues to prove its potential. And the communicator who once advised from the outside has spent eleven years proving, from the inside, what she always believed: reputation is never a moment. It is always a relationship. Across every audience, in every market, through every setback. And in healthcare, it is patients who remind you why those relationships matter.
Diane Weiser is Senior Vice President, Corporate Affairs at Cytokinetics. MYQORZO is approved for obstructive hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. The company is pursuing approval for non-obstructive HCM and preparing for its first commercial launch in Europe.
Waterhouse is a brand reputation agency that helps emerging and fast-growth life sciences companies build competitive advantage. For more information email kkraemer@waterhousebrands.com.
