Elevate Your Biotech Pitch Deck with Expert Design, Data Visualization, and Animation

By: Cameron Slayden

As scientific communicators, our entire mission at Microverse Studios is to make difficult scientific concepts easy to understand. We leverage cognitive science, vision science, story structure and more to make that happen.

Animation is the most efficient medium to communicate difficult topics, but it’s not always the most appropriate. Across scientific industries, live presentations have always been a central communication format. In particular, our clients often have to pitch to investors and potential pharmaceutical partners. That makes the biotech pitch deck a critically important medium, and we’re here to help.

Your pitch is rich with information about you and your company, far beyond the content of your slides. Your audiences get to develop a sense of your polish and your attention to detail. They glimpse your personality and begin to extrapolate your decision making style and company culture.

While it’s your job to figure out what information will go into your biotech pitch deck, we can help make sure that it makes the best possible impression. To do this, we provide several components of deck sweetening:

Graphic Design for Biotech Pitch Decks (A.K.A Deck Sweetening)

Our graphic designers can turn ideas as simple as hand-drawn charts on a napkin into gorgeous, graphically-refined slides. Often, clients have a deck that has worked for them in the past, but they want to take it to the next level visually. Our graphic designers take into account the spirit of the scientific message, and any branding elements already available to create a combination of shape, color, and layout to frame the content of each slide.

Balancing the information load for each slide is also important. Audiences can only process one stream of auditory input at a time, and that includes written text. Reading your slides while listening to you is going to be difficult or impossible, so packing a slide full of important information may be counterproductive. Part of our graphic design process is to ensure that slides have just the right amount of information to maximize clarity. Think slick and classy.

A polished biotech pitch deck communicates attention to detail and generates confidence in the message. In addition to applying these graphic improvements to your existing deck, we also provide multiple template slides for you to use as you expand your presentation.

Data Visualization in Your Biotech Pitch Deck

Chances are at some point you’ll need to communicate data in your biotech pitch deck, whether it’s financial projections or lab results that validate your technologies. Off-the-shelf graphing software does a decent job, but this is another great opportunity to engage and impress the viewer. It can be as simple as creating a 3D version of a graph, or animating it building on. Even refining the design of the graph to match the overall graphical scheme of the deck will better entice viewers to read and understand the data.

Scientific Illustration for Your Biotech Pitch Deck

In addition to the competitive landscape, opportunity for growth and other core parts to your biotech pitch deck, at some point you’ll have to explain how your science works. A well-crafted illustration helps to guide audiences through conceptual touch points, without becoming confusing. It creates a second information stream during your presentation that speeds understanding while you speak. Skilled scientific illustrators will be able to lay out your science in a way that maximizes clarity.

Scientific Animation for Biotech Pitch Decks

Animation is like illustration on steroids. Sequencing the information in time reduces the work of orienting and interpreting a still image. Animation is also rich in subtle cues that help to streamline understanding. Dimensionality, movement, and change over time all provide additional nuance that helps the unconscious mind to extract meaning from the imagery.

Much of the animation we produce at Microverse Studios goes into full-length platform explainer videos or drug mechanism of action animations for website visitors. However, when animations go into a biotech pitch deck, they have to serve a different purpose.

When we produce animation to accompany live presentations, we take into account the fact that the audience’s attention will be divided between the presenter and the animation. The audience will need time to take in the events on screen as well as the presenter’s body language and words.

We like to deliver each concept as its own short clip, so that it can play out on its own slide. This way, the presenter can control the pace of the story. We provide these clips at multiple smooth playback speeds, so that the presenter can choose one that best matches their own storytelling style.

Story Structure Analysis of Your Biotech Pitch Deck

There is no hard and fast rule about biotech pitch deck order, although there are many recommendations online. Ultimately the presenter needs to tell their story in the way most meaningful to them. With that said, everything we do here at Microverse Studios is based on cognitive science, and we have a preferred order that we like because it’s the structure most proven to sink its hooks into audiences’ brains.

Over the last century, Hollywood and commercial literature have used profitability to naturally select the optimal order and pacing of story elements. This structure can be applied to any story, including platform explainer videos, mechanism of action videos, and biotech pitch decks.

We’ve provided a deep-dive explanation of how and why this structure works that you can apply to your own biotech pitch deck, but we also offer a story structure analysis of your deck at no charge.

Biotech Pitch Deck Pricing

Our goal is always to make our services as accessible as possible, and to maximize our clients’ ROI. We price most biotech pitch deck services based on a day rate of $2,000 per artist, per day. (Don’t worry, we’re very fast!) Below, I’ve outlined the typical time commitments and costs for each of the common elements of pitch deck development.

Graphic Design (Biotech Pitch Deck Sweetening)

When our clients provide us with a deck that has all of their major elements in place, the rate we charge for graphic design is as follows: $3,000 for style development, and $500 per slide for implementation. This can be done a-la-carte, so simply building templates for our clients to populate would only be $3,000.

Data Visualization and Scientific Illustration

We estimate costs for each illustration based on our day rate, but typically they end up being $4,000-8,000 depending on complexity.

Scientific Animation Built for Biotech Pitch Decks

Interestingly, the hardest part of animation is the initial build (i.e. creating the illustration). Animating the illustration only takes a couple of days. For that reason, our animated sequences (i.e. one major thing happening on screen) tend to range from $6,000-10,000, decreasing as more animation is added to the scope.

Another benefit of this approach is that extracting stills from the scientific animation is free! For more detailed discussion on our larger production animation pricing, read this article.

We Want to be Your Thought Partners

Our clients love to work with us, because we combine deep understanding of their scientific story with outside-the-box creative thinking. We blend visual metaphor and the science of aesthetics to create a vehicle for your message designed to be unmistakable, unforgettable, and impossible to ignore.

We’ve worked in the biotech startup world since 2005, and we understand the goals of investors, potential pharmaceutical partners, and growing companies. Let us make your biotech pitch deck stand out!

Contact us for a quick, 15-minute call. This is usually all it takes to determine whether our particular skills are right for your project.