Why does life sciences marketing lag so far behind other industries in leveraging technology? While we are all accustomed to the hyper-personalized, hyper-targeted, omnichannel strategies our favorite consumer brands use, most therapeutic launches rely on stale TV commercials and generic digital campaigns. This is not due to a lack of spend – behemoths like Pfizer & Janssen spend more on marketing than they do on R&D, and the industry as a whole spends over $40B annually on advertising. So where’s the disconnect? 

We started Solstice to answer this question. In the life sciences industry, regulatory restrictions are crucial to ensure consumers are protected from misleading claims but it unfortunately also slows down content creation cycles, reduces iteration cycles, and ultimately slows down approval rates. All healthcare marketing content, whether it's a presentation for a research conference or a social media influencer post, is strictly regulated by the FDA and other governing bodies. To ensure content is compliant prior to distribution, all life sciences teams must go through the necessary – but painful – medical-legal-regulatory (MLR) review process. 

We’ve heard horror stories from chief compliance officers (CCOs) about content as simple as a search advertisement, which can be generated within minutes at a typical consumer company, taking up to five weeks in biopharma companies. The constant back and forth between creative agencies, regulatory teams, and in-house marketing teams over every line means there simply isn’t time or budget to create personalized, unique content. If a singular search ad can take five weeks and cost tens of thousands of dollars, how could any team possibly create hundreds of them to reach different audiences? Without messaging that caters to the preferences of a particular physician or patient, it becomes impossible to stand out in an ever increasing sea of content, significantly decreasing any ROI on ad spend. MLR is the bottleneck that keeps biopharma marketing in the stone age, where generic low-tech ads may or may not reach the relevant physicians or patients, and certainly will not resonate with them enough to catch their attention. This changes today.

Introducing Solstice

We’re excited to introduce Solstice, the AI life sciences marketing engine. Solstice is a singular platform that connects regulatory, marketing, and commercial functions across biopharma, allowing teams to distribute better, more compliant content faster. Our first product is the industry’s most sophisticated MLR assistant, characterized by two assistants called Fact Check Assistant and Regulatory Assistant.

The system leverages secure generative AI models to streamline much of the manual work involved in regulatory review, speeding the development and distribution cycle so biopharma marketing teams can get their product to patients faster. Fact Check Assistant accurately fact checks claims against a team’s existing knowledge base of clinical papers, brand labels, and internal trial results, and then works with Regulatory Assistant to flag statements that are non-compliant with company and industry standards. It understands specific requirements within brands, done by drawing patterns between prior-approved content as well as new suggestions made by reviewers.

Solstice is designed to integrate with existing content creation and review cycles, acting as either a stand-alone dashboard where teams can simply upload content for Solstice review, or as an integration within existing digital asset management systems (DAMs) like Veeva PromoMats. Leveraging Solstice is akin to onboarding the world’s top regulatory expert, one that understands nuanced regulations such as fair balance and consistency with FDA labeling (CFL), while also understanding the risk tolerances and specific preferences of your brand. It never overlooks a line, never forgets a specific brand requirement, and it leverages your feedback to provide even better suggestions during the next MLR cycle.  

By acting as an evolving knowledge base for a brand’s content and rules, Solstice allows teams to easily access precedents and evaluate drafts against previously approved language. The platform then allocates tasks between different review departments to most efficiently allow team members to collaborate on ideas, approve suggestions, and raise questions. Solstice does not purely provide suggestions for MLR, it acts as a true live MLR simulator, where teams can converse with a digital regulatory expert to make sure their pieces follow regulatory requirements while maintaining key messaging tactics.

Demonstrated Early Impact

Solstice empowers every commercial and regulatory team member with the ability to evaluate new content compliance within seconds. Marketing teams have used the platform to reduce their review cycle times by 74%, meaning accelerated commercial timelines and delivering content at a fraction of the time. Early users – even the most eagle-eyed PhDs – have seen MLR cycle times decrease 4x while having even more confidence in their compliance by using a system that catches errors at the onset of review so that content doesn't need to go through multiple review cycles.

Solstice has raised $3.5M to date from leading investors including Twelve Below and Virtue and is trusted by leading names in the industry including several top 20 pharmaceutical brands as well as numerous agencies in MM&M's Agency 100 list.

Visit us at www.solsticehealth.co for more information and sign up for a demo to see for yourself.