The struggle to create new life sciences content
Are you a biotech founder, marketing manager, or research scientist who’s struggling to write content that resonates with your audience? Perhaps you want to excite a new generation of scientists amid a siege on scientific freedom. Maybe you’ve had to propose how you plan to share your research as part of a grant. Or you might be recruiting more patients for the next clinical trial.
You know you need to produce content. But you’re not sure whether anyone will read it or where to start.
I was exactly in this position at one time. That was until I spoke to Paul Naphtali, founder of GenoWrite. He showed me Melanie Deziel’s Content Fuel Framework. With it, he came up with enough ideas to cover a year’s worth of content in mere days.
Using her framework will help life science communicators and marketers like you turn their expertise into content that attracts attention and excites investors, patients, and other audiences. You can also adopt a scientific approach to choose the content that you think best suits your readers.
In this article, we will show you how GenoWrite applies the scientific method to content writing and creation using Melanie Deziel’s Content Fuel Framework. When you adopt this foundation in your communications efforts, you’ll soon be attracting an audience that wants to come back for more.
Content planning: starting the experiment
Conjuring new content ideas can feel challenging, especially when you’re surrounded by a mountain of information.
I felt the same way when I first thought about content creation. That was until I realized I could approach it like an experiment. In the lab, you start with a clear question you want to answer. Once you have a research question, you produce a hypothesis based on existing research and possible outcomes. From there, you then decide how to test your hypothesis with the reagents and equipment available to you.
You can approach content creation the same way. First, you’ll outline the goal, who you want to connect with and what you want to talk about. These will serve as the foundations of your research question. Start with one thing you want to talk about and one audience group. This could be anything from an exciting discovery, a new protocol that you developed, or an introduction to your field.
Once you answer these questions, we can then move on to your hypothesis: what kinds of content do you think your audience will respond best towards?
The Content Fuel Framework helps you decide what to write and how you will share it. By selecting one of each, you can test different approaches to content creation and decide which ones connect with your audience best.
Now, let’s see how the Content Fuel Framework works below.
Introducing the content fuel framework for the life sciences
Think of the Content Fuel Framework as your lab notebook for content creation. In her book, Melanie describes The Content Fuel Framework as a simple way to decide what you’re talking about and how you’ll share it (Table 1). These are called the focus and the format. Below, we walk through both sets of categories with examples tailored to scientists, biotech founders, and researchers.
Focus
Like any research scientist, anyone who’s producing content must start with a clear focus. The focus provides the boundaries in which your content will cover. Here are the ten focuses you can start with as you decide what to highlight from your research:
- People: If you’re a PrincipaI Investigator, your “Lab Members” page is a great example of “People”-driven content. Here, you spotlight the team conducting the research with you.
- Basics: With a focus on Basics, you’re explaining fundamental science, such as a receptor or a signaling pathway, at the center of your research.
- Details: If your content’s focused on Details, you can unpack the nitty-gritty of specific experiments, parameters, or concepts that form the basis of your research.
- History: If you like history, this is for you. Here, you might guide readers through earlier papers, failed attempts, or even a “happy accident” that changed the course of your research. Think of The Code Breaker, detailing the story of CRISPR, by Walter Isaacson as an example.
- Process: Think of this focus as transforming the “Materials and Methods” section of your paper into content that a colleague can learn from.
- Curation: A Curation focus comprises a selected list of items, such as “10 new developments in immuno-oncology you should be watching” or “5 must-read papers if you’re new to CRISPR therapeutics.”
- Data: Any content focused on Data depicts it in ways that anyone can understand. Consider the figures and tables that you list in your manuscript. That’s an example of data-focused content.
- Product: Content focused on product emphasizes a specific item or set of items.. Think of the YouTube videos you watch when learning about existing high-throughput sequencing platforms as an example.
- Example: Examples are like testimonials or supporting evidence. They demonstrate the truth behind how you understand the world. A case study whereby a library sequencing kit improves rare variant detection is an example.
- Opinion: An Opinion focus is where you share your perspective on trends or emerging technologies in your field through a journalistic piece or letter to the editor in a reputable journal in your field.
For example, if you want to talk about your newly published research paper, you might place your focus on the details of your discovery or innovation. If you want to talk about your biotech startup, your focus might be placed on your unique technology and how it works, or the people who comprise your team. Both are topics that your intended audience would be interested in, whether for collaborations or investment in your company.
If you have an idea of what you want your audience to understand, you’ve found your focus.
Format
Once you identify your focus, you can then start thinking about the format. Think of them like the reagents and equipment you use to run your experiments. Certain reagents and equipment are better for studying specific aspects of your research, and some formats are better for writing about certain topics. The Content Fuel Framework lists ten formats that you can consider to highlight your focus, which are as follows:
- Blog: A blog is a simple, regularly updated web page where you share short articles, ideas, or explanations. You can use blogs to explain your research, answer common questions, and show how your work helps people in the real world.
- Social media post: When you distill your main idea into a short thread on LinkedIn, X/Twitter, Reddit, or similar platforms, you’re using a Social Media Post format.
- Podcast: If you’ve listened to (or hosted) a 30-minute conversation where a scientist explains their work on, say, the blood–brain barrier, that’s a Podcast format.
- Case study: When you walk through a real-life example of how your product, assay, or service worked for a client, you’re creating a Case study.
- News: If you share an announcement about your company launch through a press release, that’s a News format.
- Guides: When you compile a walkthrough such as “A beginner’s guide to single-cell RNA-seq” you’re using a Guide format.
- Infographic: If you turn a complex pathway or data set into a single visual that someone can grasp with a cursory glance, you’re using an Infographic format.
- Quiz: When you engage your audience by asking them questions and giving feedback or explanations, you’re working in a Quiz format.
- Interview: If you sit down with an industry expert and ask the questions that the broader scientific community is thinking about, you’re creating an Interview format.
- Webinars: When you host a live session with a panel on emerging methods, you’re using a Webinar format.
Here’s an example to consider. If you’ve decided that your focus is explaining the basics of a new paper to non-experts, your format options might include an explainer video or a short blog. If your focus is on making history by announcing a company launch to potential investors, your format might be a news-style article.
If you’d like to see Melanie’s original table and dive deeper into her method, check out her book The Content Fuel Framework and the resources on her website. Otherwise, make a 10×10 table with each row and column headed with each focus and format. Then, fill away! By mixing and matching them, you can create at least 100 different content ideas from your research!
Case study: how I got started (and how you can too)
Now that you have the Content Fuel Framework as a working guide, let’s walk through what using it will look like in the life sciences. I’ll use my own graduate school research as an example.
During my PhD, I worked on new ways to boost our immune system against infections. This relied on something called “trained immunity”, where certain innate immune cells can be taught to respond better the next time they encounter a threat. Think of it as giving frontline immune cells a “head start” before infection.
The thing is, too much training would be like adjusting the fire alarm to be so sensitive that it goes off every time you make toast! Excessive trained immunity in the body is more disastrous, however. It can lead to chronic inflammation and contribute to autoimmune and neurological disorders.
At first, there was no easy way to control where and how much training occurred.
Enter nanoparticles.
To keep the process of trained immunity safe and effective, I designed nanoparticles — tiny carriers that innate immune cells eat up — to carry molecules that induce trained immunity. These particles allowed the gradual release of the training molecules, reducing the risk of overreactions. This approach also helped us better control where training took place, limiting any adverse effects. With these two advantages, our team safely induced trained immunity in mice, protecting them from developing skin cancers.
Explaining nanoparticle design, immunology, and the idea of trained immunity to different audiences was not straightforward.
That’s where the Content Fuel Framework became extremely useful. By pairing different focus areas with specific formats, I could break the research into smaller “content experiments” instead of trying to explain everything at once. Here are a few combinations that came out of that process:
- Basics × Infographic: I created an infographic introducing the concept of trained immunity in simple terms — what it is and why it matters.
- Details × Social media: I turned specific aspects of my nanoparticle delivery system into short social posts, each one focusing on a single detail.
- Opinion × Blog: I wrote a blog-style piece sharing my perspective on where the field might be headed, especially how my results in a mouse model could be translated into humans.
You can apply the same approach to your own work. Start with one project, pick a focus (Basics, History, Data, etc.), choose a format (blog, infographic, podcast, social post), and see what kinds of content you can produce from each combination. You will realize very quickly that one research project turns into a whole series of content ideas.
An important caveat to remember
To keep your audience engaged over time, you need more than just ideas. You also need a simple plan for what to say, when to say it, and whether it’s working. That means checking three things each time you create new content:
- Does this topic and tone reflect your brand and voice?
- Is this the right time and place to share it, given where your audience is in their journey?
- Do you have a way to see how well it performs so you can adjust future content?
A lot of this comes down to understanding your audience persona and how you want to guide them over time. We review the details of audience personas in a separate blog post. In the meantime, if you’d like a simple way to explore what order and type of content might work best for your business needs, try our interactive quiz below.
Conclusion: content planning made easy
Life science professionals are rarely short on ideas. If anything, there are too many. The hard part is choosing where to start and feeling confident enough to publish it. It’s completely normal to feel underprepared or like you are not a real content creator. Especially when all your training has been in running experiments, not writing blogs or posts. One way to quiet that imposter syndrome is to treat content creation like an experiment too.
In this blog, we’ve walked through a scientific method for content creation, using Melanie Deziel’s Content Fuel Framework as a lab notebook. Just as you refine a broad research question into a clear hypothesis and protocol, you can refine a vague idea into a specific piece of content by choosing a focus (what you want to talk about) and a format (how you want to present it).
Content creation may seem intimidating at first, but if you treat it like any experiment by planning it, running it, and observing what happens, you’ll get better with each iteration. Over time, you’ll feel more comfortable creating content that keeps your audience engaged and also see yourself as a confident content creator, not an imposter.
Try coming up with one new idea today by pairing a focus and a format that fit your current project. Treat it as a small experiment, run it, and see how your audience responds.
