Some thoughts on the challenges of communicating R&D progress milestones for pipeline drugs to investors and the general public
10 years Quinz – 10 years of Q-DNA – 10 years of intriguing work
In honour of our 10th anniversary, we are thrilled to complete our anniversary series with our fifth publication “To communicate or not to communicate? Some thoughts on the challenges of communicating R&D progress milestones for pipeline drugs to investors and the general public”.
One of the flagships of our life sciences department is our global compliance practice. This practice supports international clients – often close-to-market biotech companies with a promising pipeline – on a variety of compliance-related questions (for example on pharmaceutical advertising) under relevant local jurisdictions within the EU. This often includes a challenging exercise in risk assessment and mitigation, not least because the majority of such questions are transnational in nature and require a balancing act between various national requirements.
In this short article we share a few thoughts on a common compliance stress test for biotech companies with a hopeful drug candidate, i.e. how to communicate about their pipeline when -on the one hand- pharma compliance rules prohibit the promotion of unregistered drug products but -on the other- financial transparency standards require that milestones in their R&D progress are shared with the general public to avoid information asymmetry and abuse of insider information (provided that such information is not misleading of course). No need to tell you that this established compliance dichotomy has been re-actualized through the recent avalanche of (not always flawlessly accurate) public communications (press releases, press articles, online communications, presentations at conferences, etc.) on the R&D progress of certain COVID19 product candidates.
We hope you’ll enjoy the read!
