Editor's note: revised June 19, 2026. Originally published August 3, 2016.
Biotech is the hardest communications category in the consumer-adjacent economy. The science is technical. The audiences span investors, regulators, physicians, patients, and the general public. The regulatory exposure is high. The reputational consequences of getting it wrong — from market-cap losses to FDA scrutiny to patient harm — are severe. The category has changed substantially since this piece was first published. The communications discipline has not changed at the same speed.
What biotech communications actually has to do
Biotech communications has to bridge between two registers simultaneously: the precision required for scientific accuracy, and the accessibility required for non-scientific audiences. The brands that win the category build infrastructure for both. The brands that fail typically pick one register and ignore the other.
Three audiences need to be served by every major communication:
Specialist audiences — investors, equity research analysts, regulators, physicians, KOLs, academic researchers — need full scientific specificity. Mechanism of action, clinical trial design, statistical significance, comparator data, regulatory pathway. Imprecision here costs credibility immediately and is unrecoverable.
Patient and advocacy audiences — disease-state communities, patient organizations, caregiver groups — need accurate information delivered in patient-appropriate language. These audiences are highly motivated, often deeply educated on their conditions, and have low tolerance for either condescension or hype.
General consumer and media audiences — broader public, business press, mainstream media — need plain-language framing of why the science matters. This is where most biotech communications fails: either by overpromising (the science-fiction problem) or by underexplaining (the technical-paper problem).
The landscape today
Four categories are setting the communications agenda for biotech in 2026.
Cell and gene therapy. CRISPR-based therapies moved from research to commercial approval with Casgevy (exa-cel) — the first FDA-approved CRISPR therapy, cleared in December 2023 for sickle cell disease. Vertex Pharmaceuticals and CRISPR Therapeutics co-developed and now share the commercialization. The communications challenge: pricing (the therapy is among the most expensive ever launched), access (a complex multi-month treatment protocol), and patient education (a meaningful share of the eligible patient population is concentrated in communities that have historically been underserved by clinical trials).
mRNA platforms. The COVID-19 vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech proved out mRNA as a delivery platform at unprecedented scale. The follow-on pipeline — cancer vaccines, rare disease applications, expanded infectious disease coverage — is moving through clinical trials. The communications challenge: rebuilding trust after the politicized COVID period, while accurately communicating the broader pipeline potential without overpromising on timelines.
GLP-1 and metabolic disease. Eli Lilly's tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound) and Novo Nordisk's semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) have reshaped the metabolic disease category and consumer expectations of pharmaceutical interventions. The communications challenge: managing supply constraints, navigating the compounded-product secondary market, addressing the cultural conversation around use cases beyond the approved indications, and engaging on safety signals as long-term data emerges.
AI-driven drug discovery. Isomorphic Labs (Alphabet), Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Insitro, and the AlphaFold-enabled cohort of structural-biology AI startups have moved AI drug discovery from a thesis into an operating reality. The communications challenge: differentiating credible scientific progress from AI-hype-cycle pattern matching, and educating non-specialist audiences on what the technology actually does versus what it claims to do.
What biotech communications should be doing
Four operating practices distinguish biotech brands that build durable communications equity from those that consume it.
1. Publish primary explanatory content. A biotech company that does not produce its own scientifically accurate, plain-language explanatory content cedes the explanation to others — and often to inaccurate or hostile sources. Original explainers, mechanism-of-action documentation, clinical trial summaries written for non-specialist readers, and ongoing publishing through the development cycle compound credibility.
2. Engage disease communities as partners, not audiences. Disease-state advocacy groups have organized expertise, media access, and credibility that biotech firms cannot replicate from the outside. Sustained, transparent engagement — including in development setbacks and trial failures — builds durable trust. Transactional engagement around launch milestones builds the opposite.
3. Communicate setbacks before they leak. Trial failures, FDA delays, safety signals, and label changes are part of the biotech development cycle. Brands that communicate these proactively, with full context and operational response, recover faster and rebuild credibility more durably than brands that wait for the news to surface through investor channels or regulatory disclosures.
4. Build AI engine retrieval infrastructure. Physicians, patients, and investors increasingly query AI engines — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — for information on biotech companies, mechanisms, and pipelines. Biotech communications that does not include explicit work to make accurate, current information retrievable by AI engines is leaving the most consequential discovery layer to third-party summaries. See coverage of this discipline across the EPR AI Visibility and GEO archives.
The takeaway
Biotech communications is downstream of the science but upstream of every commercial outcome. The brands that win the category build communications as core infrastructure, not as launch-cycle marketing. The brands that fail treat communications as something that happens around product approval and product launch — and discover at the next setback, the next safety signal, or the next pricing controversy that the credibility was not there when they needed it. More pharma and healthcare communications analysis across the EPR archive.
Related from the EPR archive: When Security Failures Become PR Crises · 2020 Crisis PR Cases: Burger King, Oh Polly, Boeing · How Brands Boost Marketing Returns
