Our Mission

The Pharma Letter offers high value news and insights for people with a professional interest in the global pharmaceutical, biotech, generic and biosimilar industries.

Headquartered in London, the company draws from a network of foreign correspondents, with healthcare journalists around the world providing insight on local markets.

Founded in 1991, the newspaper was bought out of IMS Health by its editor, Barbara Obstoj-Cardwell. Originally known as the Pharma Marketletter, the paper has always had a broad distribution, serving readers in diverse markets around the world.

Under the continued editorship of its original founder, The Pharma Letter still reports on all aspects of the pharma and biotech industries, and is now a digital-only publication.

The founding editor of Scrip, editor Barbara Obstoj-Cardwell brings her extensive knowledge of the industry to bear, including in a weekly editorial digest, available for subscribers.

Drawing from its long history, the site offers a unique repository of life sciences reporting, with over 90,000 articles stretching back to the year 1992.

Coverage includes:

Company news

Financial reports, marketing developments, trends and strategies, corporate development, company profiles, legal influences, R&D trends, M&A activity, sales performance, stock market analyses and personnel appointments.

Product news

Drug submissions, approvals and rejections, licensing arrangements, clinical trial developments and results, product development and new product launches.

European, USA and world news.

Regulatory developments, FDA/EMEA news, market legislation, pharma market movements, reviews of current and proposed legislation and regulation, conference details and write-ups.

Digital focus

In 2010, The Pharma Letter joined forces with London-based digital services firm Byte9, led by managing director Angus Phillipson.

The new joint venture enabled the company to boost its digital presence, including the offer of a personalized news feed for life sciences companies.

Investments in the underlying digital technologies used by The Pharma Letter have enabled a transition to an updated, more flexible platform for news reporting, coming online in stages from 2022.

This is allowing The Pharma Letter to provide more evergreen content, with data-driven articles based around continually updated sources of information.  Such reporting will often focus on patents and regulatory approvals, as well as financial databases and other sources of company information.