Medical affairs is now pharma’s second-biggest conference topic, and the buyer is moving with it

Medical affairs is now pharma’s second-biggest conference topic, and the buyer is moving with it

We’ve been analysing six years of NEXT Pharma Summit transcripts: 475 sessions and 1.73 million words in total, with every theme normalised to mentions per 10,000 words so the years compare cleanly. One theme moved more sharply in 2026 than anything else in the data. Medical affairs jumped from 5.2 mentions per 10,000 words in 2025 to 15.9 in 2026, second only to AI itself and above trust, omnichannel and customer experience. That’s triple last year’s level and a 298% rise since 2022.

Medical affairs as a function, certainly across the last decade, has usually been treated as a supporting act. It’s now the second-densest topic on a senior pharma stage. It means that, for anyone selling into pharma, the argument on those stages is now about who, internally, should own the customer.

What does the conference data show?

We tracked every top-tier theme year by year, normalised for corpus size, so the numbers reflect topic density on stage rather than raw session count. AI is still the biggest topic in the corpus by a wide margin, and it climbed again in 2026. Trust roughly doubled, while Omnichannel and customer experience, the two themes pharma spent most of the last decade investing in, carried on flattening. Medical affairs is the only major topic to have surged in 2026 while those themes kept sliding.

How does medical affairs compare with the rest of the agenda?

Source: Buzz Radar analysis of 475 NEXT Pharma Summit sessions, theme-frequency dataset, verified June 2026.

The room is still talking about AI more than anything else. What it now wants AI to do is a medical affairs job.

Why is medical affairs being elevated now?

Analysts have been calling medical affairs pharma’s third strategic pillar, alongside commercial and R&D, for a few years. What changed in 2026 is that the elevation stopped being a slide and started being an org-chart question. The 2026 NEXT Medical Festival in Brussels ran an Oxford-style debate titled “who should own customer insights, medical or commercial?” On a marketing stage five years ago, when medical and commercial occupied separate, compliance-firewalled territory, that question would have been strange. Now? Not so much.

The accelerant is AI. When Merck signed its deal with Google Cloud worth up to $1 billion in April 2026, the company told Fierce Pharma it was “completely reimagining how we create and distribute content to engage with HCPs,” using agentic AI to deliver more personalised information to doctors and health systems. That is scientific content, aimed at scientific audiences, at a scale that only holds up if the credibility layer holds up. That layer sits with medical affairs.

This shows up more sharply on European stages, where most of our corpus was recorded. Commercial promotion in Europe stays tightly bound by codes like the ABPI’s, and the scientific, non-promotional exchange medical affairs owns is one of the few HCP channels with real room to grow.

What is medical affairs being asked to do?

Read the panels closely and the work looks digital, and about influence more than authorship. As the Medical Affairs Professional Society’s 2025 roundtable on Digital Opinion Leaders and HCP influence mapping put it, traditional one-to-one engagement “is no longer sufficient,” and medical teams now have to find, rank and engage the clinicians who shape opinion in online spaces, not just the ones who publish.

That is a different brief from the one medical affairs was built for. It means knowing which oncologist moves peer behaviour on LinkedIn rather than which one has the longest publication list, reading the conversation around a congress as it happens, and mapping who influences whom across a therapeutic area, then evidencing what engagement changed. The MAPS panel cited 60% of US adults now searching online for health information as the reason the digital influence map has become a medical affairs deliverable rather than a marketing nice-to-have.

This isn’t a surprise to us. Buzz Radar has been building against this for years. What has changed is who inside pharma commissions it.

Why is this a buying-committee shift, not a fashion?

Influence and social listening work has spent the last decade being sold to marketing. If the 2026 conference data reads the industry correctly, the budget holder in 18 months’ time may sit inside medical, and the requirements come with the seat.

This means that evidence standards go up, while tolerance for noise goes down. Outputs have to survive a compliance review, with a hard line between scientific exchange and promotion. That is a different brief from the one social intelligence has usually been sold against.

We built BRIANN for that harder brief. Every output goes through a dedicated pharma analyst before it reaches a decision, and where the data is not strong enough to back a claim, the system flags the gap rather than smoothing over it. A marketing team chasing share of voice can take or leave that check. A medical affairs lead standing in front of compliance cannot.

What does this mean for the next 18 months?

The curve has been climbing for four years and 2026 is its steepest yet. On the trajectory the corpus shows, the DOL and influence conversation keeps moving from marketing budgets towards medical ones, more sharply in Europe than in the US. The providers who come out of that shift with a seat at the table will be the ones who can meet a scientific buyer’s evidence bar rather than a marketer’s appetite for a dashboard.

Pharma has spent six years arguing about how to engage HCPs at scale. It is now arguing about who, internally, should own that engagement. Our data says medical affairs is winning that argument on stage, and the people selling into pharma will have to catch up with a new buyer.

Frequently asked questions

Is medical affairs really pharma’s second-biggest conference topic?

Yes. In Buzz Radar’s analysis of 475 NEXT Pharma Summit sessions from 2020 to 2026, medical affairs reached 15.9 mentions per 10,000 words in 2026, second only to AI in general (38.2) and ahead of trust, omnichannel and customer experience. That is triple its 2025 level.

Why is medical affairs taking on social intelligence and DOL work?

The influence shaping clinical opinion has moved online and the work is scientific rather than promotional. Identifying and engaging digital opinion leaders, mapping HCP influence and tracking congress conversation increasingly sits with medical affairs, the function with the scientific credibility to do it compliantly.

How does this change who buys pharma social intelligence?

Budget and requirements are shifting from marketing and digital teams towards medical affairs. Medical buyers need outputs they can defend in front of compliance, with a clear line between scientific exchange and promotion, which is why human-validated audience intelligence matters more to them than a raw dashboard.

What is a digital opinion leader in pharma?

A digital opinion leader (DOL) is a clinician, patient advocate or allied professional who shapes medical opinion through active social and online channels rather than only through journals and conferences. Medical affairs teams now find, rank and engage DOLs as a core part of scientific communication.

About the author

Patrick Charlton is CEO and co-founder of Buzz Radar, a pharma social intelligence company. He has spent over a decade helping pharmaceutical and technology brands decode audience behaviour through social data, and leads the team behind BRIANN, audience intelligence built for pharma’s toughest jobs.

LinkedIn | buzzradar.com

Admin Published on July 13, 2026 2:18 pm