A former IT services firm found a second life in pharmaceutical communications. Its most useful lesson concerns what happens before someone picks up the phone.
The boutique agency built a business around a hard editorial problem: making consequential science clear without making it careless.
One advisory board, a folding table and 3,000 envelopes became a 25-year medical communications company. JB Ashtin’s real product is the thing agencies rarely put on an invoice: trust under pressure.
A small San Diego agency found a useful place to stand: between the scientists who know too much and the audiences who have too little time. Its advantage is not louder advertising. It is a roomful of eye doctors willing to argue with the draft.
For three decades, the Santa Monica firm has worked behind the scenes where science, logistics and pharmaceutical compliance collide. Its real product is not the meeting, the slide deck or the app - it is making all three agree.
Shire had a new eye drug and a small ophthalmics team. RHMM helped prepare the professional audience - a revealing assignment for a company built around science, relationships, and getting the work done.
A medical communications agency is helping patients enter the scientific conversation as contributors. Its publication credits show what that work looks like - and why listening is only the beginning.
Two sisters started with regulatory services, watched their own writers wrestle with hundred-page reports, and built software around the bottlenecks. The result is a useful playbook for enterprise AI: begin with paid work, reject the clever features that cannot be checked, and automate only what experts can defend.
Ritivel is an AI-native workspace for regulatory and medical writing teams at life sciences companies. Its AI agents draft dense regulatory documents - CTDs, CSRs, INDs, and BLAs - directly in Microsoft Word, following FDA formatting rules and pulling from a company's own clinical data and prior submissions, with every claim cited back to its source. The goal is to compress work that normally takes weeks of manual synthesis into minutes, helping drugs reach patients sooner.
HiRO (Harvest Integrated Research Organization) is a full-service, globally oriented clinical research organization founded in 2020 that helps biotech companies run clinical trials across borders. Positioning itself as an 'integrated' rather than a traditional 'contract' research organization, HiRO connects Asian biotechs seeking trials outside their region with US and European sponsors wanting to run studies in Asia. Backed by a tens-of-millions-of-dollars Series A led by OrbiMed and built out through three CRO acquisitions, it offers end-to-end services from preclinical strategy to regulatory submission, with deep expertise in oncology and rare disease.
Weave Bio is a San Francisco-based, AI-native software company that automates the regulatory paperwork behind drug development. Its platform ingests preclinical and clinical study data and drafts submission-ready documents - INDs, investigator's brochures, clinical study reports and health-authority responses - in eCTD-ready format, cutting timelines that once took months down to hours while keeping human reviewers in the loop. Founded in 2022, Weave serves biotech, pharma, CROs and regulatory consultants, and raised a $20M Series A in October 2025 to bring total funding to roughly $36M.