The MLR loop: what the numbers actually say
In the pharmaceutical industry, promotional content production has almost tripled in three years. Marketing teams in labs now produce more assets - approved emails, eADV, medical brochures, congress presentations - while maintaining the same compliance requirements. In France, the ANSM (French medicines agency) requires all of these materials to be filed four times a year. Every claim must be sourced, every visual compliant with the SmPC (Summary of Product Characteristics), every asset validated before distribution.
The result: marketing teams find themselves orchestrating a growing volume of content within a regulatory framework that was not designed for speed. The MLR (Medical, Legal, Regulatory) loop involves at least five stakeholders - medical affairs, regulatory affairs, communications, legal, MSLs (Medical Science Liaisons, field-based scientific representatives) and medical reps - and takes an average of three weeks from first draft to final approval. That timeline doesn't account for the back-and-forth caused by versions poorly synchronized across teams.
Why the loop takes time, and where it's lost
Understanding where the friction sits is the first step to addressing it. In a classic MLR loop, time splits into two distinct phases.
The first is the time to get into review: the asset is produced, but it's waiting to be sent to the right people, in the right order, with the right files. This phase is often invisible yet costly. It depends entirely on marketing's ability to coordinate submissions, chase teams, and make sure everyone is working on the right version.
The second is the review time itself: once the asset is submitted, each team reviews the file, formulates feedback, and communicates it to marketing. This is where most teams lose the thread. Feedback arrives by email, on different versions, without clear status on what's validated, what's pending, what's been modified.
It's not a skill problem. It's a tooling problem. The MLR loop is being run with tools - email, file transfers, manual tracking sheets - that were not designed for it.
What Miriad changes in the way the loop is run
Miriad is a content review and validation platform. It centralizes the entire MLR loop in a single space, accessible to every stakeholder without account creation.
Concretely, the product manager uploads the asset once, then creates a distinct group for each team involved in the approval. Medical has theirs, regulatory has theirs, communications has theirs. Each team annotates directly on the right version of the file (PDF, visual, packaging artwork, etc.) and only sees its own exchanges with marketing. Feedback from medical doesn't get mixed with feedback from regulatory.
Marketing has access to the full dashboard. They see in real time the progress of each review, which version each team is working on, and which points remain open. Every approval is timestamped and archived, which constitutes an audit trail directly usable for the ANSM filing.
Two benefits are immediate. First, the time to get into review shrinks: no more sequential email sending, all teams access their group simultaneously. Then, the review time itself becomes trackable: marketing always knows where each team stands, without manual follow-ups.
Benefits for each stakeholder
For the product manager, Miriad turns the coordinator role into a pilot role. They're no longer the person chasing feedback. They're the person with visibility on the full process, deciding when to move forward.
For medical and regulatory affairs, the value is clarity: the version under review is always clearly identified, annotations are directly actionable on the file, and no comment from another team interferes with their reading.
Succeeding your ANSM filing with complete traceability
The four annual ANSM filings are fixed deadlines. They don't move based on the volume of assets to validate, nor on the surprises that come up mid-cycle. For marketing teams, the question isn't whether the MLR loop is necessary. It's how to run it so you arrive at the filing with the right versions, validated by the right people, with complete traceability.
That's the challenge Miriad addresses directly: giving marketing the means to run its MLR loop with the rigor the sector demands, without that rigor resting solely on the individual vigilance of the product manager.