5 Things That Will Define The Future Of Pharma’s Medical Affairs

Published 9 September 2026

Author(s): Bertalan Meskó, MD, PhD

Over the past years, I have given more than a hundred keynotes to Medical Affairs teams around the world. These conversations have given me a close look at the questions they keep returning to, the technologies they are trying to understand, and the challenges they increasingly face in their daily work.

Medical Affairs is the part of a pharmaceutical company that connects scientific evidence with clinical practice. Its teams work with healthcare professionals, researchers and patients, communicate and interpret medical evidence, gather insights from the field, support education, and help make sure that the use of medicines is grounded in the latest scientific knowledge.

Again and again, the same themes come up: how to use AI without losing the human side of the profession, how to engage patients in a more meaningful way, how physicians themselves are changing, and how Medical Affairs can remain relevant as medical knowledge becomes increasingly mediated by algorithms.

Based on these discussions, I think there are five developments that will have a particularly important impact on the future of Medical Affairs.