Stephanie Ritz, PhD
Medical Writer — Oncology & Patient Education
PhD in Cancer Biology with over a decade of oncology and pharmaceutical sector experience. Stephanie translates complex clinical evidence into patient-first health content for SunnyPharma readers.
The Difference a PhD in Cancer Biology Makes
Stephanie spent more than a decade doing something most medical writers never do: sitting inside the commercial pharmaceutical sector while it decided how to talk about cancer therapy. She watched, from the inside, the gap between what clinical trials actually showed and what patients ended up understanding about their own treatments. That experience made her allergic to the kind of medical content that explains everything except what the patient needs to know.
Her articles for SunnyPharma are written from that allergy. When she covers HIV treatment options, hepatitis C therapies, or weight-management medications, the structure is the same: what the trial showed, what the trial did not show, what it costs, and what to actually do with the information. The voice is patient-first because Stephanie spent years writing the version that wasn’t.
From the Lab to the Page
Stephanie earned her PhD in Cellular, Developmental, and Molecular Biology with an emphasis in Cancer Biology from the University of Alabama at Birmingham. She also completed the Writing in the Sciences program through Stanford University School of Medicine, sharpening the communication skills that distinguish her work from standard pharmaceutical copy.
Before launching her independent medical writing consultancy, Oncology Intellect LLC, Stephanie spent years serving as a subject-matter expert for market research and health economics projects spanning more than 30 tumor types across the US, EU5, and Japan. That depth of therapeutic-area knowledge means every article she writes for SunnyPharma is grounded in real-world clinical context — not surface-level summaries.
Stephanie’s process inverts the usual order. Most medical writers start with the source material and then think about the reader. Stephanie starts with a specific question a real patient is trying to answer — “is the generic actually the same?” or “will my insurance pay for this?” — and works backward to the evidence that answers it. The market research years trained her to identify what patients actually ask before what they say they want to know.
The HEOR background does the second job: every article is screened for whether the cost and access information is current, accurate, and useful at the level of an actual prescription decision. Numbers without context are not useful. Context without numbers is not actionable. Stephanie’s articles try to deliver both.