The Pharma Perspective

Medical writing rates, AI-proof writing tests, and the telltale signs of AI-generated content: on this episode of The Pharma Perspective, pharmacist turned medical writer Virginia Chachati breaks down what it takes to build a writing career in healthcare today. Virginia explains how she went from community pharmacy to creating health videos with the NHS, why copywriting in healthcare comes with strict legal guardrails, and how France and China are regulating who gets to publish health information online. She also unpacks how to break into medical writing in the age of AI, from unpaid writing tests to pricing your work in the thousands rather than by the hour, and why marketing yourself matters as much as your skill, before closing on personal versus professional branding and what she's building next. Essential viewing for anyone in medical writing, medical communications, pharmacy, health content creation, or life sciences.

Most Favored Nation (MFN) drug pricing, pharma tariffs, and China overtaking the US in new drug launches: on this episode of The Pharma Perspective, market access and policy expert Neil Grubert breaks down the forces reshaping how the world prices and pays for medicines. Neil explains what Trump's Executive Order on Most Favored Nation pricing really means, why the US funds an estimated 75% of global pharmaceutical profits, and how tariffs are being used to pressure drug companies and governments. He also unpacks the EU Pharmaceutical Package, Europe's growing launch hesitancy, and the moment when China overtook the US in new medicines brought to market, before closing on what he would change about global drug pricing. Essential viewing for anyone in pharma, market access, HEOR, health policy, or life sciences.

In this episode of The Pharma Perspective podcast, Grant Coren, life science recruiter with over 30 years of experience and founder of his own executive search practice, discusses the state of the pharma job market in 2026, why hiring has slowed across pharma, biotech, and CRO alike, how AI screening tools and applicant tracking systems are changing — and distorting — the recruitment process, why most CVs fail to differentiate candidates and what to do instead, the ethical problems with how many recruiters operate and how job seekers should navigate that, the difference between retained executive search and contingency recruitment, how indirect referencing allows recruiters to vet candidates outside of formal references, why loyalty is no longer rewarded in pharma careers and when job-hopping actually accelerates progression, the personality traits that predict success in different pharma roles, the real impact of ageism in life sciences hiring, and why getting your first job in the industry remains the hardest step of all.

In this episode of The Pharma Perspective podcast, Jerry Avorn, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of "Rethinking Medications," discusses the state of drug regulation in the United States, the problems with accelerated approvals and missing confirmatory trials, how academic detailing can change prescribing behavior more effectively than guidelines, the misuse of surrogate endpoints in drug development, why weak FDA enforcement actually harms pharmaceutical innovation, the absence of cost-effectiveness analysis and health technology assessment in US drug policy, and where he sees hope for reform through state-level drug policy coalitions and evidence-based prescribing initiatives.

In this episode of The Pharma Perspective podcast, Katja Rüdell, one of the world's leading clinical outcome assessment and patient-reported outcomes experts, discusses the role of PROs in drug development, regulatory expectations from FDA and EMA for outcome measure validation, the challenges of developing fit-for-purpose COA instruments, the evolution of patient-centred research in pharmaceutical clinical trials, and best practices for ensuring PRO data meets both regulatory and clinical standards.