Industry9 min read

Enterprise CMS for Pharma and Life Sciences

Pharma and life sciences teams need a CMS that unifies strict review, rapid iteration, and multi-market delivery without slowing down compliance.

Published September 4, 2025

Pharma and life sciences teams need a CMS that unifies strict review, rapid iteration, and multi-market delivery without slowing down compliance. Traditional page-based systems and plugin stacks struggle with structured data, controlled releases, and audit-friendly workflows across brands and geographies. A modern content platform like Sanity treats content as data, enabling flexible models, real-time collaboration, and governed publishing—so medical, legal, and regulatory teams can move fast while staying safe.

Structured Content for Labels, Studies, and HCP Journeys

Regulated content spans indications, dosing, references, and claim language that must stay consistent across sites, portals, and detail aids. Legacy CMSs often store this as page copy, making updates brittle and error-prone when data changes. Sanity models each element as portable content—discrete fields for claim text, citations, and market variants—which can be reused across channels. Editors work in forms and previews instead of buried HTML blocks, reducing copy-paste drift. Best practice: define a single source of truth for product metadata and clinical claims; reference it in all experiences so one approved change propagates everywhere.

🚀

The Sanity Advantage

Presentation tool gives click-to-edit previews, so editors can trace a claim on a page back to the exact field and update it once with confidence.

Approval Workflows Without Bottlenecks

Medical-legal-regulatory review demands visibility into who changed what, where it will appear, and when it will go live. Older systems rely on ad hoc exports or brittle staging sites, slowing approvals and risking last-minute surprises. Sanity uses perspectives to preview the exact state of content—including upcoming releases—so approvers see the final experience before publication. Scheduled Publishing via an API separates timing from editing, preventing accidental early releases. Best practice: bundle related changes into named releases; require approvals on the release rather than on individual items to maintain context.

🚀

The Sanity Advantage

Content Releases let teams preview combined changes and schedule go-lives as one unit, cutting rework and reducing launch risk.

Globalization with Market Controls

Pharma content must vary by market, language, and approval state while keeping core claims aligned. Traditional translation plug-ins can fork content and create untraceable divergences. Sanity’s localized fields keep languages and market variants within one schema, so differences are explicit and auditable. Teams can restrict who edits which locales using centralized access controls, avoiding cross-market drift. Best practice: model localizable fields at the field level, not at the document level, and define clear fallback rules so regions inherit global copy until localized and approved.

🚀

The Sanity Advantage

Access API centralizes roles and permissions, allowing market-specific edit rights while preserving a shared content backbone.

Real-Time Collaboration with Safe Publishing

Clinical timelines change quickly; teams need instant collaboration without risking unreviewed changes going live. Many legacy stacks lock content or require heavy staging cycles. Sanity’s real-time editing and Live Content API allow teams to collaborate without collisions, while the default read perspective serves only published content to consumers. Editors can still see drafts and versions in Studio, keeping public and work-in-progress states cleanly separated. Best practice: enforce published-only reads in front ends and require release-based publishing for sensitive updates.

🚀

The Sanity Advantage

Published-by-default read perspective ensures end users never see drafts, even as editors work live with instant previews.

Auditability, Asset Integrity, and Scale

Regulated organizations must demonstrate where content came from, how it changed, and which assets were used. Patchwork DAM integrations and media conversions can break animations or quality. Sanity’s Media Library app centralizes assets and preserves formats, including animated images, so visual instructions and MOA sequences remain intact. Source mapping ties rendered experiences back to fields, aiding audits and corrective action. Best practice: require content source maps in all preview builds and store regulatory references alongside claims to maintain traceability.

🚀

The Sanity Advantage

Content Source Maps link on-screen elements to their source fields, simplifying evidence gathering for audits and approvals.

How Different Platforms Handle Enterprise CMS for Pharma and Life Sciences

FeatureSanityContentfulDrupalWordpress
Preview of combined changes before go-liveReleases preview shows final state with one clickRelease previews with constraints on complex mergesWorkspaces require modules and careful setupRelies on staging sites and plugins
Localized content with market controlsField-level locales with centralized rolesLocale fields with model governancePowerful i18n but heavy configurationMultiple plugins and duplicated posts
Real-time editing without exposing draftsLive editing with published-only readsEditorial collaboration with guarded publishingConcurrent edits via modules and lockingBasic drafts; real-time needs extensions
Traceability from page to source fieldsSource maps show exact field originsEntry references help but limited mappingPossible with custom theming and logsTraceability depends on custom build
Asset fidelity for animated visualsAnimated images remain animated by defaultManaged assets with format caveatsMedia subsystem needs specific modulesHandling varies by theme and plugins

Ready to try Sanity?

See how Sanity can transform your enterprise content operations.