How to Choose a PR agency for Biotechnology companies

By Aidan Sowa, CEO and Founder, Frontier Industries | October 2026

A biotechnology company is a promise with a laboratory attached. For a decade or more it may sell nothing, employ brilliant people, burn serious money, and rest entirely on whether strangers believe its science will survive contact with human biology. The industry own data says most of those promises fail: the overall likelihood of approval from Phase I was 7.9 percent across 2011 to 2020 (BIO, Informa and QLS Advisors, 2021). This guide is about choosing the agency that helps you be believed accurately, by investors, partners, patients and recruits, in a business where belief is the working capital. Overstate nothing. You cannot afford the correction.

Key numbers for this decision:

• 7.9 percent: likelihood of approval from Phase I for drug candidates, 2011 to 2020 (BIO, Informa Pharma Intelligence and QLS Advisors, 2021)
• 28.9 percent: share of candidates that clear the Phase II transition, the largest single hurdle (BIO et al., 2021)
• 10.5 years: average time for a Phase I asset to reach approval (BIO et al., 2021)

I Discrimen

You are not marketing a product; you are underwriting a probability

Every audience you address understands this except, sometimes, your agency. Investors price the probability. Partners diligence it. Patients hope against it. Employees bet their careers on it. Communications that behave as if the outcome were certain, a pipeline described in the grammar of destiny, corrupt all four relationships at once, because the base rates in this industry are printed and public: roughly one candidate in thirteen that enters Phase I reaches approval (BIO et al., 2021).

The right agency voice is calibrated conviction. It says what the platform can do, what the data so far actually shows, what the next experiment will decide and when, and what would change its mind. That calibration is not modesty; sophisticated audiences discount uncalibrated voices automatically, and the discount follows you into term sheets.

Probability is your product. Precision is your packaging. Any firm that wants to round your odds up for effect is spending your credibility to buy its applause, and the bill arrives at the readout, addressed to you.

Test it in the pitch. Hand finalists your most ambiguous dataset and ask for the announcement paragraph. The firm that surfaces the ambiguity and still finds the true, strong sentence understands your business. The firm that irons the ambiguity flat does not.

II Machina

Belief in biotech is manufactured at readouts, conferences and financing windows

Your reputation does not accumulate evenly. It reprices at discrete events: a data readout, a medical conference presentation, a regulatory interaction, a financing, a partnership announcement. Between events, the market trades on the story you told at the last one. An agency for a biotech company is therefore an events business with a narrative maintenance problem, and it must be excellent at both halves.

Event excellence is preparation depth: scenario plans for success, failure and the muddy middle that real data usually delivers; embargo and disclosure discipline under securities law; clinician and key opinion leader briefing that informs without scripting. Narrative maintenance is the quieter craft: keeping the platform story current as programmes advance and die, publishing the reasoning when priorities change, and making sure the version of your company in a partner diligence file matches the version on your website.

The muddy middle is the test. Clean success writes itself and total failure silences itself. The ambiguous readout, efficacy in a subgroup, a safety signal in a handful of patients, is where agencies earn or burn a decade of trust in an afternoon. Choose the firm whose draft for the ambiguous case you would sign.

Conferences deserve their own discipline, because they are where the scientific community forms the opinion that diligence later confirms. Abstract timing, poster honesty, the investigator chosen to present, the questions your team hopes for and the ones it fears: a prepared company treats a congress like a product launch for its credibility, scheduled months out. An unprepared one treats it as a trip. Watch how finalist firms talk about the major meetings in your field. Fluency there is a proxy for whether they can actually reach the audiences that decide your value, or whether their media lists are borrowed and their confidence is rented.

III Exemplum

Phase II is where stories go to be audited

The industry data makes the point with unusual clarity: just 28.9 percent of candidates achieved the Phase II transition across the decade studied, and programmes using patient preselection biomarkers roughly doubled their approval likelihood to 15.9 percent (BIO et al., 2021). Translation for founders: the market has read these tables, and it prices your Phase II design, biomarker strategy and all, before it listens to your adjectives.

Watch what that means for a real company at the transition. The firm with credible communications arrives at Phase II with its scientific case already understood: the mechanism story told at conferences for two years, the biomarker logic published and debated, the investigators known and respected. Its readout is received as the next chapter of a story the audience has been following. The firm that saved its storytelling for the data arrives as a stranger announcing a miracle, and strangers announcing miracles get the hardest questions in the room.

Build the audience before you need its belief. That sentence, in biotech, is not a marketing preference. It is the difference between a readout that funds the next phase and one that starts an obituary.

IV Damnum

A credibility failure costs a biotech its runway, not its ratings

Big companies lose reputation points. Young biotechs lose quarters of cash. When a story breaks badly, a missed endpoint spun too hard, a safety event disclosed too slowly, an executive quote that aged in a week, the consequences arrive in the only currency that matters: the next financing gets smaller, later or gone; the partner who was circling asks for more data and more time; the senior scientist you were recruiting chooses the company whose record looks adult.

There is no communications budget line that captures this, which is why boards underprice communications until the first repricing. Consider the asymmetry honestly. The fully loaded cost of senior, science literate communications counsel for a year is a small fraction of one month of burn for a clinical stage company. The cost of a credibility discount applied to a financing is measured in dilution and in trials never run. Founders who understand this staff communications like they staff regulatory: early, senior and inside the room where data decisions are made.

Exaggeration is the most expensive habit in this industry. It feels like confidence in the quarter it is published and reads like evidence at the diligence that matters.

V Genus

Agency types along the biotech road, with honest labels

Stage decides the row. A preclinical platform company needs narrative and talent brand most, and can buy event support per readout. A company entering the clinic needs the specialist or the boutique with a readout record, because the next twenty four months will be decided in about six news days. A company approaching approval needs the pharmaceutical disciplines of the companion guide: claims registers, launch governance and community trust built at pharmaceutical depth.

Whatever you choose, contract the named individuals. In this sector the firm is a wrapper; the two or three people who have stood in a readout war room are the product.

VI Regio

Segment by audience, because biotech has four publics and one story must survive all of them

The scientific community judges your data and your manners: what you publish, how you cite, whether your claims respect the audience intelligence. Investors judge your milestones, your candour about timelines and your history of doing what you said. Patient communities judge your respect: whether you listened before you needed enrolment and whether you stayed after the trial ended. Future employees judge your seriousness, because the best people in this industry can smell a promotional culture through a website.

One narrative must serve all four without changing its facts. That is a harder craft than it sounds, because each public hears a different sentence as the headline. The scientist hears the endpoint. The investor hears the date. The patient hears the hope. The recruit hears the standard. An agency that writes four different stories will eventually be caught comparing them, usually by the patient community, which reads everything. Write one true story, weighted four ways.

Therapy area redraws the map again. Rare disease work, where approval likelihoods run higher and communities are small and organised (BIO et al., 2021), demands intimacy and patience. Oncology, the most crowded and unforgiving arena, demands data precision above all. Brief your agency on your area politics by name, the rival programmes, the conference factions, the patient organisations, or accept a plan that could belong to any pipeline on earth.

VII Occasio

The opening: candour about the base rates buys you belief about your exception

Here is the counterintuitive move available to every honest biotech. Publish your relationship with the odds. The company that says, plainly, that most Phase I programmes fail, that its own path runs through a Phase II wall most candidates never clear, and that its biomarker strategy exists precisely because preselection doubled success rates in the industry data (BIO et al., 2021), earns a hearing for its claims that pure confidence never gets. Sophisticated audiences are starved of this voice. They reward it with the benefit of every doubt.

Patients reward it too. Communities that have been promised miracles by a decade of press releases develop exquisite detectors, and they transfer trust wholesale to the companies that speak like adults. In rare disease especially, that transferred trust is enrolment, retention and advocacy money cannot purchase.

An agency that proposes this candour strategy understands the decade long game. One that flinches from the base rates will flinch at your first hard readout, and that is when you will need it most.

VIII Consilium

Score the hire on readout record and calibration

Contract structure that fits the sector: a modest retainer for narrative maintenance, event fees agreed in advance for readouts and financings, and a standing rule that no external statement about data goes out without scientific and communications sign off recorded in writing. On the worst day of your decade, that paper trail is the difference between a company that stumbled and a company that misled.

Browse the resources library for the neighbouring health guides, and note how the governance model on the public relations services page scales from private biotech to public pharma.

Frequently asked questions

When should a biotech company first hire communications counsel?

When the story starts being told by others: at the first institutional financing, the first conference abstract or the first patient community conversation, whichever comes first. Before that, founder led communication guided by a few hours of senior advice is usually enough. After it, improvisation gets expensive quickly, because the record you create in year one is the record diligence reads in year five.

How do we talk about a platform without overpromising therapies?

Describe capability and evidence in separate sentences, always. The platform has done specific things in specific models and studies; the therapies are hypotheses at stated stages with stated next tests. Agencies earn their fee by policing that seam in every document, because platforms die politically when a single failed asset is allowed to retroactively falsify carefully separated claims.

What should be ready before a first in human readout?

Three announcements drafted and approved in outline: success, failure and ambiguity, each with its data tables, its limitations paragraph and its stakeholder call list. A clinician spokesperson briefed for hard questions. A patient community note written with more care than the press release. And a board agreed line on what the result means for runway, because the market will ask within the hour.

How do we handle a failed trial honestly without ending the company?

Publish the data completely, say what was learned in specific terms, state the decision it forces, programme continuation, redesign or termination, and honour the patients who volunteered in the first paragraph, not the last. Companies survive failed trials regularly. What they do not survive is the discovery that they shaded one. The failure is an event. The shading is a character verdict.

Should we engage patient communities before we have a therapy?

Yes, if the engagement is real: listening, registry support, trial design input, reported back honestly. Communities keep receipts across decades and across companies, and their memory is the closest thing this industry has to a permanent record. Start early, disclose your interests, and never mistake access for endorsement. The community leaders you treat as partners in the quiet years become, without ever being asked, the most credible witnesses to your character in the loud ones.

How much should we spend relative to our stage?

Enough to keep senior counsel inside your data calendar, and no more until events demand it. For most preclinical and early clinical companies that means a lean retainer plus event budgets, reviewed at each financing. The metric is not spend as a share of budget. It is whether, on your six biggest news days of the next two years, the people in the room have done this before.

How this guide was built

This guide is grounded in the clinical development success rate research published by BIO with Informa Pharma Intelligence and QLS Advisors covering 2011 to 2020, FDA approval reporting, and KFF trust research, listed below. Success rates are population statistics, not predictions for any programme, and securities and disclosure questions belong with your counsel. The framework reflects the economics of belief in a high failure industry, which is the ground every biotech communications decision stands on.

IX Incipe

Where Frontier Industries fits

Frontier Industries staffs biotech work with readout tested counsel: scenario libraries drafted before data lock, one true story weighted for four audiences, and a candour standard that treats the base rates as an asset. The team is introduced on the about page.

If your company is choosing now, bring your next three milestones and your hardest dataset to one conversation: start an industry campaign enquiry or call 401-219-4207.

Sources

1. BIO, Informa Pharma Intelligence and QLS Advisors, Clinical Development Success Rates and Contributing Factors 2011 to 2020, including the 7.9 percent likelihood of approval from Phase I. https://go.bio.org/rs/490-EHZ-999/images/ClinicalDevelopmentSuccessRates2011_2020.pdf 2. Pharmaphorum, Clinical development rates are falling but it is not all bad news, analysis of the BIO success rate series. https://pharmaphorum.com/rd/clinical-development-rates-are-falling-its-not-all-bad-news 3. FDA, Novel Drug Approvals for 2023, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research. https://www.fda.gov/drugs/new-drugs-fda-cders-new-molecular-entities-and-new-therapeutic-biological-products/novel-drug-approvals-2023 4. KFF, Trust in pharmaceutical companies and health institutions, 2025 polling. https://www.kff.org/health-information-trust/kff-poll-finds-that-most-adults-lack-confidence-in-key-health-agencies-to-act-independently/ 5. ClinicalTrials.gov, trial registration and results disclosure requirements. https://clinicaltrials.gov/ 6. Biotechnology Innovation Organization, industry resources and policy publications. https://www.bio.org/ 7. US Securities and Exchange Commission, guidance on disclosure and forward looking statements. https://www.sec.gov/rules-regulations 8. Edelman, Trust Barometer, science and technology trust findings. https://www.edelman.com/trust-barometer 9. HHS Office for Civil Rights, privacy guidance relevant to patient community engagement. https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/index.html 10. American Society of Clinical Oncology, research and conference resources relevant to oncology communication. https://www.asco.org/