Medical Affairs

Turning scientific evidence into medical information and balanced communication.

Dr. Veysel Bodakçı contributes to Medical Affairs activities in the role of Medical Manager at TAB İlaç Sanayi A.Ş. The focus of this work is the review of literature, the appraisal of clinical evidence and the development of scientific content.

What Medical Affairs does

Medical Affairs is the function through which scientific information is produced, appraised and shared with healthcare professionals within a pharmaceutical or health technology organisation. It is kept separate from commercial functions because it answers a different question. The commercial function addresses how a product is positioned; Medical Affairs addresses what the data shows and where it falls silent.

Principal areas of work

• Evidence appraisal — examining the methodological quality of published studies and reading effect size together with its uncertainty.
• Medical content development — turning scientific data into a communicable text while preserving its source and its limits.
• Scientific exchange — answering questions from healthcare professionals within the bounds of available data, and saying plainly where data does not exist.
• Tracking evidence gaps — identifying the questions literature does not answer and setting out where research is needed.

The test of balanced communication

In content prepared within Medical Affairs, a reader needs to be able to separate three layers: which statement is a research finding, which is an interpretation of that finding, and which remains an open question. Where that separation is not made, scientific data quietly becomes a claim.

The same test applies to how numbers are conveyed. When only a relative risk reduction is shared, an effect can appear substantial even where the absolute difference is small; relative and absolute measures therefore belong together, with the confidence interval alongside them.

Why it is a distinct function

Whether scientific information can be appraised independently depends on the function preparing it being separated from commercial objectives. That separation is more than an organisational arrangement: it is a condition of the information being trustworthy.