PR in science and technology is how an organization makes its work legible to the people who can’t access the underlying research. For marketing, sales, and communications teams in science and technology companies, it covers media relations, thought leadership, executive profiling, crisis communications, and investor relations – the full set of tools that determine what partners, investors, regulators, and journalists understand about your organization and whether they trust what they hear.

Here I’ll cover why PR works differently in science and technology than in other sectors, what the data shows about its impact, three Asian companies that ran it well, one cautionary case, and how a consistent PR program now feeds AI search visibility alongside traditional media coverage.

Takeaways

Science and technology PR must communicate simultaneously across multiple audiences with different information needs
Science and technology companies publish far fewer press releases than comparable B2B tech firms, leaving funding rounds, acquisitions, and product milestones uncovered
Organizations with no crisis communications infrastructure face greater reputational damage when problems emerge
Earned media placements are 5.3 times more likely than owned content to be the sole source of a brand‘s AI search visibility

What makes PR in science and technology different from mainstream PR

Most PR disciplines deal with a single primary audience. Science and technology organizations rarely have that luxury. A deep-tech company pitching to enterprise clients needs its research to read as rigorous to procurement officers, compelling to journalists, defensible to regulators, and investable to fund managers – often at the same time. Each group reads differently and requires a different translation of the same underlying work.

The science environment adds further constraints. In sectors governed by peer review, organizations can’t always get ahead of their research pipeline. Announcing a discovery before it has been reviewed and published creates credibility risks that don’t exist in consumer goods or retail. Science and technology PR must work within those rhythms, building momentum through thought leadership, analyst engagement, and media relationships before results arrive, so there is already an informed audience ready to receive them.

The translation problem sits at the center of all of it. Most of the audiences a science or technology company needs to reach can’t evaluate the underlying technical work themselves. PR is what bridges that gap, and the organizations that treat it as optional tend to discover its absence at the worst possible moment.

What the data shows about PR’s impact

Science and technology companies, particularly those in research-intensive sectors, are underinvesting in PR relative to other B2B technology companies. My research into academic research technology companies found that most publish 0–2 press releases per year, while comparable B2B SaaS companies publish 10 or more. Acquisitions, funding rounds, and product milestones that would generate business press in any other sector pass without announcement, and the earned media record that investors, partners, and journalists draw on never gets built.

Earned media placements are 5.3 times more likely than a company’s own website to be the sole source of its AI search visibility, according to Muck Rack’s research into what AI systems actually cite. A company that does no external PR has handed its discoverability to whatever third-party content happens to mention it.

Companies that don’t build PR infrastructure early find they have no editorial record to draw on when a journalist asks a question, a crisis demands a response, or an AI system decides whose work to cite.

Three companies that got it right

Preferred Networks (Japan)

Preferred Networks (PFN), founded in Tokyo in 2014, built its international profile not through a single campaign but through a decade of consistent, bilingual communications around its AI research and corporate partnerships. The company developed Chainer, one of the first open-source deep learning frameworks, and used each subsequent partnership announcement to extend its media footprint.

Toyota invested ¥1 billion in PFN in December 2015, and a further ¥10.5 billion (US$95 million) in August 2017, making Toyota the company’s largest external shareholder. Both rounds were managed as structured media events with CEO Toru Nishikawa available in both Japanese and English-language press. PFN’s official announcement gave journalists and investors enough technical and commercial context to write confidently about Japanese AI development at a time when that narrative was competing with coverage of US and Chinese companies. Reuters, CNBC, and Nikkei Asia all covered PFN’s subsequent work on custom AI chips, autonomous trucking, and cancer research.

For Japan-based science and technology companies operating across language barriers, the PFN model – named founders, bilingual communications, and each partnership framed as a news event – is the template. Our work on scientific press release writing addresses exactly this gap.

Celltrion and the Remsima biosimilar launch (South Korea)

Celltrion, based in Incheon, was not a household name in pharmaceutical markets when it began developing CT-P13, a biosimilar of infliximab. Getting a biosimilar approved as the first of its kind required demonstrating scientific equivalence and regulatory credibility to audiences that were skeptical of biosimilars as a category.

Celltrion’s communications combined rigorous clinical trial data with targeted media relations across Europe and the US, positioning the company around making treatment more affordable rather than around copying a branded product. That positioning gave prescribers and payers a reason to advocate for biosimilar adoption in their markets. Remsima received EMA marketing authorization in September 2013 as the world’s first monoclonal antibody biosimilar approved by the European Commission. FDA approval followed in April 2016. CT-P13 is now approved in over 100 countries. None of that commercial progress was automatic; communicating the science credibly to regulators, prescribers, and payers was part of the work, and the media record Celltrion built over the approval process made it easier for each subsequent market to receive the product.

Hummingbird Bioscience (Singapore)

Hummingbird Bioscience is a Singapore-based precision biotherapeutics company that discovers and develops antibody-drug conjugates for hard-to-treat cancers. For a mid-sized biotech competing for licensing partners against much larger companies, PR builds the scientific credibility that makes a potential partner willing to read the data package.

Hummingbird’s communications approach has run consistently through named scientific spokespeople, structured conference presentations at major oncology meetings, and press-released partnership announcements that give biotech media concrete facts to work with. CEO Piers Ingram and CSO Jerome Boyd-Kirkup, PhD, appear as named voices in announcements, giving journalists and investors a credible human face behind the science.

In October 2023, Hummingbird licensed HMBD-501, its HER3-targeted antibody-drug conjugate, to Endeavor BioMedicines for worldwide rights worth up to $430 million in potential payments. That deal required Endeavor to trust Hummingbird’s science before reviewing the full data package. The preceding years of conference presentations, scientific publications, and structured PR announcements built that trust. The Ellerton & Co. piece on AI and quantum PR across Southeast Asia identifies the same dynamic in deep tech: precision industry messaging that gives decision-makers something concrete to act on is what moves licensing and partnership conversations forward.

When the absence of PR infrastructure becomes the story

In the summer of 2023, a South Korean science company published a preprint claiming it had produced a room-temperature, ambient-pressure superconductor – a discovery that, if true, would have been one of the most consequential in physics in decades. The preprint was posted without peer review and without any communications infrastructure around it.

Bloomberg, Reuters, and the BBC covered it within hours. Social media amplified claims the company itself hadn’t made. Replication attempts began immediately in labs across China, the US, and Europe, and those attempts were also covered in real time.

The company had no named media spokesperson, no PR team, and no capacity to frame or contextualize developments as they unfolded. Co-authors publicly contradicted each other in the press about what the data showed. When replication attempts failed to confirm superconductivity, the coverage of failure was as large as the coverage of the original claim had been. A Korean scientific committee later concluded the material was not a superconductor.

The reputational damage ran deep precisely because there was no communications infrastructure to slow it. A company with a media relations function and a named, credible spokesperson can contextualize negative replication results, explain the role of peer review in validating preliminary findings, and keep the institutional voice coherent under pressure. Without that, the story belonged entirely to whoever was covering it.

PR as an ongoing function, not a campaign

Science and technology PR works when it’s built as a permanent function rather than activated in response to events. Journalist familiarity with your organization’s work doesn’t appear when you need it; media relationships and editorial presence build over years of consistent, credible contact.

The earned media record this builds compounds in value. Coverage in credible outlets creates the public record that AI search systems draw on when formulating answers, which is increasingly how procurement teams, investors, and partners discover organizations before making direct contact. MacroLingo’s analysis of how PR and earned media drive AI search visibility covers the mechanics in detail, but the short version is that organizations with no earned media record are largely invisible to AI systems regardless of how well their own website content is written.

For science and technology organizations in Japan, Southeast Asia, and across Asia-Pacific, MacroLingo’s PR and media services for science and technology run through its partnership with Ellerton & Co., a specialist PR agency with networks across Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, India, Japan, Europe, and beyond.

Share your ambitions with us and let’s see what a consistent PR program looks like for your organization.