How One Pharmaceutical Company Transformed Medical Affairs from Reactive to Proactive

The competitive intelligence gap. The Company’s flagship product competes in an indication where several other pharmaceutical companies have established products, well-resourced MSL teams, deep publication budgets, and extensive real-world evidence programs. The Company’s clinical differentiation was being challenged by emerging real-world data, and MSLs were encountering these publications in KOL conversations before Medical Affairs had formally assessed them. Each MSL was spending 15-20 hours per week on manual literature surveillance: pulling abstracts from PubMed, scanning congress proceedings, cross-referencing ClinicalTrials.gov for competing agents, and assembling briefing documents. The work was duplicative. Multiple MSLs independently searched the same publications and reached slightly different conclusions about what mattered.

Because the drug requires biomarker testing before it can be prescribed, MSL conversations inevitably turn to testing logistics: which labs run the assay, what turnaround times look like, and whether newer testing methodologies are validated for this indication. When a new paper compared testing approaches, or when a reference laboratory expanded its validated assay panel, MSLs needed to know about it. Not because it changed the drug’s efficacy, but because it changed the conversation a physician would have about prescribing it.

The congress preparation burden. Before each major congress, including ones where the company had its own abstracts accepted, the Medical Scientific Communications team pulled every abstract mentioning the Company’s products, competitor agents, companion diagnostic testing, or pipeline targets. The MSL team manually built congress briefing books, commenting on the abstracts based on the Company data.

The process worked, but at enormous cost. After one congress cycle, the MSL Operations lead calculated that the team had spent hundreds of person-hours on preparation, the equivalent of two full-time employees for a month. The output was a PDF that half the team had not finished reading before the conference started. There was no time left for the proactive competitive intelligence work the SVP wanted.

The SMRL bottleneck. The Medical Information team fielded hundreds of unsolicited medical requests, each requiring a Standard Medical Response Letter (SMRL). While the team had several responses in their reference library, constructing each letter still consumed approximately 20 hours of MSL time: pulling the right clinical evidence, formatting citations, and ensuring the response addressed exactly what was asked in an accurate, compliant, and rapid manner.