Imagine creating a groundbreaking medical treatment and getting it approved by the FDA, only to have unwieldy technology prevent you from sharing it online with those who could really benefit from it. For far too long, this has been Biogen’s reality.
The biotechnology company researches and manufactures medicines to treat spinal muscular atrophy, Alzheimer's, and MS. Their digital platforms educate physicians and patients on their offerings and clinical trials — until recently, publishing this content was a long, drawn-out process, thanks to a well-known but rigid content management system (CMS). The platform lacked key features to facilitate translations, and building new webpages was both time-consuming and costly. There was also the matter of content sprawl. Biogen’s marketing team was spread across the globe, each tasked with creating their own content. This led to disjointed web pages and inconsistent branding.
Eager to speed up time to market and unify content, Biogen began actively looking for a flexible, headless alternative to its legacy technology. This type of technology decouples the content layer from the presentation layer, allowing teams to manage content for different locales from a single space.
“Our goal was to simplify the way web pages are built, streamline localization, and reduce the overall cost of building pages. We also wanted to find a way to have content creators publish pages in near real-time, and not have to wait for a deployment to production or deployment from lower environments to higher environments,” shared Arthur Allard, Customer Solutions Lead at Biogen.
In 2020, Biogen switched to Contentful — and got exactly what they were looking for.
Curing siloed content with a unified platform
First, Biogen migrated existing content — including BiogenLinc, its healthcare provider portal — to the Contentful platform.
“Consolidating commercial, medical, and event-related content within a single system once seemed out of reach for pharmaceutical companies,” said Allard. “Contentful made that integration not only feasible but effective. It’s been essential for capturing analytics and delivering a consistent brand experience to healthcare professionals, regardless of where they enter the site.”
To speed up content production and ensure brand consistency, Biogen’s engineering team built a library of reusable components, or content types. With these content types, Marketers can create new content without developer support, saving time and resources. “When we started comparing the cost and time it takes to build the same things on our former CMS, Contentful clearly had the upper hand,” Allard added. “We didn’t need to code everything, which meant we didn’t need to outsource additional development support.”
With fewer content management responsibilities to worry about, Biogen engineers can focus on improving BiogenLinc’s product roadmap. They’re especially interested in creating tailored user experiences complete with rich content recommendations and a notification center.
In fact, the team is already building the framework for a ‘suggested content’ tool that uses data and self-reported user preferences to deliver personalized content to healthcare professionals. — like providing unique treatment recommendations based on the professional's area of expertise. And it’s being built on Contentful.
Injecting AI Actions for automated translations
Biogen is also saving resources when it comes to localization. Before adopting Contentful, regional teams would hire external agencies to translate content. Getting the content right (i.e., complying with medical and legal requirements) took a lot of back-and-forth communication before editors could even input the content into their CMS. This process took days, sometimes weeks, and required a significant budget. Biogen publishes around 1,500 pages of content each year, which it then translates into 30 languages. Over time, these costs added up.
Biogen engineers planned to develop their own solution to this issue until they came across AI Actions, a Contentful-native tool that leverages generative AI to streamline content management, automate translations, create image alt text, copyedit spelling and grammar errors, optimize content for keywords, and more.
Excited by the idea of doing translations in-house, Biogen decided to try AI Actions. After some experimentation and refining the prompt with accurate medical terminology, Biogen rolled the tool out to its editors. The payoff was immediate. Editors began fulfilling translation requests faster than ever, and they didn’t need outside support.
“AI Actions has enabled us to really transform our translation process. It went from taking weeks, with added expenditures, to taking just minutes at no added cost,” said Allard. Biogen estimates that it's saving upwards of 50K dollars annually with this change.
Researching workflow optimization at scale
While Biogen has already checked a lot off its to-do list, Allard and his teams are continuing to find new Contentful features and capabilities to test.
“Contentful is the heart of our health care professional portal at Biogen. We were lucky enough to start testing AI Actions – specifically for translation – early, and this has been a small revolution within the revolution as we are now able to localize, clone, and translate a web page from one language to another in a matter of minutes, vs. days previously. We look forward to even more efficiency as we go deeper with translation and take advantage of other features like SEO optimization and copy review."
“We're also really interested in Workflows. We have a very drawn-out review process for content, which could potentially help with,” added Allard.
With Contentful at the center of its digital operations, Biogen is streamlining high-effort tasks like translation, speeding up time to market, and continuously adopting new tools to scale with precision. For a global, highly regulated organization, the ability to move quickly while maintaining control isn’t just efficient — it’s a strategic advantage.
