WHAT IS MEDICAL AFFAIRS? ROLES AND INFORMATION SERVICES.

By María García-Puente · Research · July 2026

Broadly speaking, three worlds coexist inside a pharmaceutical company: the one that researches and develops the medicine (R&D and clinical), the one that commercializes it (marketing and sales), and, sitting between the two, one that's less visible outside the industry: Medical Affairs, the medical department. Its mission is to manage the company's scientific knowledge about its products and communicate it rigorously to whoever needs it: healthcare professionals, researchers, regulators, and, increasingly, patients.

Medical Affairs isn't a separate function by organizational whim. It exists out of a need for independence: scientific communication about a medicine can't depend on someone with sales targets to hit. Regulatory frameworks and industry codes of practice (the EFPIA Code in Europe; the Farmaindustria Code of Good Practice in Spain) require that the scientific information a company gives healthcare professionals be truthful, balanced, and kept separate from promotion. Medical Affairs is the structure that guarantees this: when a physician asks the company about a medicine’s use, a drug interaction, or safety information, it's the medical department that answers, literature in hand, not a sales rep.

For years it was seen as a support function, but that's changed. The growing complexity of therapies (biologics, advanced therapies, precision medicine), the pressure to demonstrate value to payers and HTA agencies, and the explosion of real-world data have turned Medical Affairs into a strategic pillar on par with R&D and commercial. And a department whose core asset is scientific knowledge is, inevitably, a heavy consumer of information services.

• MSL (Medical Science Liaison): the company's scientific face in the field. MSLs build relationships with key opinion leaders and investigators in their therapeutic area, exchange scientific information with them, and feed clinical-practice insight back to the company. To do this credibly, they need to stay continuously up to date with the literature in their field.
• Medical information: the function that answers the scientific inquiries that come into the company, mostly from healthcare professionals. Every response has to be documented, balanced, and referenced; behind almost every inquiry there's a literature search.
• Medical writing: drafting the department's scientific documents, from training materials and standard response letters to manuscripts and clinical documentation. We cover it in its own article: Medical Writing: what it is, who needs it.
• Publications: planning and managing the company's scientific output (manuscripts, abstracts, congress posters), following publication best practices such as the GPP guidelines and the ICMJE recommendations on authorship.
• Evidence and RWE (real-world evidence): generating and synthesizing evidence beyond the clinical trial: observational studies, registries, real-world practice data. Here, literature reviews, systematic or not, are a daily working tool.
• Medical education: designing training activities for healthcare professionals, from sessions and symposia to continuing medical education (CME) programs, always built on vetted scientific content.

Literature surveillance. Knowing, week by week, what's being published on your molecules, your competitors, and your therapeutic areas. A PubMed alert isn't enough: it takes a well-built search strategy, maintained over time, plus screening that separates the signal from the noise. Surveillance feeds MSLs, medical information, and medical leadership alike, and when it covers safety literature it connects directly to pharmacovigilance obligations.

Responses to medical information requests. Every medical information request means tracking down the best available evidence on a specific question, often on a short deadline. A poorly done search here is no small matter: the answer reaches a professional who's going to make clinical decisions based on it.

Literature reviews. From the narrative review that provides context for a therapeutic area to the systematic review that underpins a manuscript or an HTA submission, including scoping reviews that map an emerging field. These are projects where the search methodology (which databases, which strategy, which screening criteria) determines how valid the result is.

Value dossiers. The documents that synthesize a product's clinical and economic evidence for payers and HTA bodies rest on comprehensive, up-to-date literature reviews. A value dossier built on a weak search is a vulnerable dossier.

Publication support. Behind every manuscript there are literature searches for the introduction and discussion, reference verification, checks against editorial policies and journal requirements. It's pure information work, even when nobody calls it that.

Does it make sense to keep all of this in-house? For the most part, yes, and it's worth saying clearly: medical information is a recognized, well-established function in the industry. Companies, especially the larger ones, run Medical Information departments staffed by information specialists and professionals dedicated to scientific documentation. In Spain that practice has its own community and its own body of guidance: AMIFE (the Spanish pharmaceutical medicine association) brings these professionals together, and its Medical Information working group published a best-practice guide that's a reference point for the sector. We're not talking, then, about medical departments with no information expertise of their own.

The gap an external partner fills is a different one: the small company or the affiliate without a properly resourced Medical Information team, and the workload peaks where an internal team, however good, simply can't keep up. Setting up and maintaining a surveillance program, a systematic review against a deadline, an urgent value dossier, a sudden spike in inquiries — these are exactly the moments where bringing in information specialists who slot into the team saves an MSL or a physician from burning hours on a task that is, on top of everything, a specialty in its own right: building reproducible search strategies, choosing the right databases, and screening with a method.

We work with pharma medical departments to cover exactly that gap: we design and maintain literature surveillance tailored to each therapeutic area; we run literature searches for medical information requests and one-off projects, with documented, reproducible strategies; we handle the methodological side of literature reviews, systematic ones included; we provide publication support (searches, references, journal selection, editorial policies); and we train teams to get more out of the sources they already have, from PubMed to AI tools.

IN SHORT

When a professional information specialist runs the search, the strategy, the sources, and the date all get documented: the traceability industry best practice demands, and that holds up under an audit or a reviewer's question.

• MAPS (Medical Affairs Professional Society): What is Medical Affairs: resources on the function and its roles.
• EFPIA: Code of Practice: the European pharmaceutical industry's code of good practice.
• Farmaindustria: Código de Buenas Prácticas de la Industria Farmacéutica (Spain's pharmaceutical industry code of good practice).
• DeTora LM, et al. Good Publication Practice (GPP) Guidelines for Company-Sponsored Biomedical Research: 2022 Update. Ann Intern Med. 2022.
• ICMJE: Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals.
• AMIFE (Asociación de Medicina de la Industria Farmacéutica en España — the Spanish pharmaceutical medicine association), Medical Information working group. Rojo Abril M, Fragoso J (coords.). Guía de buenas prácticas de Información Médica en la industria farmacéutica española. Documenta Universitaria; 2018. ISBN 978-84-9984-402-2.