Medical Writing 101 – Don’t Recreate the Wheel

In medical writing, whether you are working on the background section of a protocol or writing about the available therapies in a disease space, it behooves you to do some internal detective work. Likely, nearly all the key information has already been written or at least synthesized by someone within the company or working on behalf of the development program. Before you jump in and start writing from scratch, don’t be afraid to ask members of the team if this information is already available. Some key documents might include the investigator’s brochure, briefing books, prior protocols, or clinical/nonclinical summaries. Any older content will probably need updating and tweaking, but you’ll have a head start and will save hours of needless rewriting and researching. And if you are truly the first to put pen to paper on a given aspect of your drug, take care and be sure to annotate content clearly – what you are writing will likely be reused and recycled for years.  

Justin McLaughlin, CEO