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Frequently asked

Questions we hear most.

From medical writers, regulatory leads, security reviewers, and procurement teams. Don't see yours? Email us — every question makes the next pilot smoother.

Product

What Asthra does, and what it doesn't.

What documents does Asthra draft?

Today: Clinical Study Reports (CSRs), Periodic Safety Update Reports (PSUR / PBRER / DSUR), Clinical Evaluation Reports (CERs), and CTD Module 3 (CMC). Each module type ships with its own writing rules — ICH E3 for CSRs, ICH E2C/E2F for safety reports, MEDDEV 2.7/1 Rev 4 for CERs, ICH M4Q for CMC.

Does Asthra replace medical writers?

No. Asthra removes the mechanical part of writing — assembly, copy-paste, cross-section consistency, table summarization — so writers spend their time on judgment, narrative quality, and review. Every output requires writer review and approval before it ships.

Where does Asthra run?

Inside Microsoft Word, as a task-pane add-in. Writers don't switch tools or learn a new authoring environment. The drafting agent runs in your data perimeter (managed SaaS or your own VPC); see Trust center for details.

Can I use my own templates?

Yes — and you should. Asthra writes into your house templates, preserving section numbering, headings, table-of-contents structure, and styles. Onboarding includes a one-time mapping of your templates to module-specific writing rules.

Can Asthra edit existing drafts, or only create new ones?

Both. You can hand Asthra a partial draft and ask it to fill specific sections, refine an existing narrative, swap a source, or update a section against new data — all with the same closed-system retrieval and ledger that produces a fresh draft.

Trust & AI quality

Why regulators can audit what Asthra produces.

How do you prevent hallucination?

Three mechanisms compound. (1) Every draft sentence is bound to a retrieved passage — the model can't generate a factual claim without a citation handle. (2) Retrieval is closed: there's no fallback to pretrained knowledge for facts. (3) Missing data triggers explicit gap flags instead of plausible-sounding text. Hallucination becomes a deterministic ledger entry, not a soft risk.

What "two-level citations" means in practice.

Document-level citations attach to every section — every section says which source documents it draws from. Sentence-level citations are available on demand: click any sentence and see the file name, page number, and exact text snippet that supports it. The graph also supports blind-review workflows where citations are hidden from QC reviewers until they request them.

What happens when the source data is contradictory or missing?

Asthra surfaces it explicitly, inline, as a gap flag — and writes around the gap rather than papering over it. The flag is recorded in the ledger so reviewers see exactly which sections need additional source material before submission.

Are our documents used to train any model?

No. Customer documents are never used for model training — neither by Asthra nor by Anthropic. Our enterprise contract excludes prompts and content from training and fine-tuning. Each project's source set is isolated to that customer.

Which underlying model do you use?

Anthropic Claude, via Anthropic's enterprise API or, in customer-VPC mode, via your own Bedrock or Vertex deployment. We track frontier model releases and validate Asthra against each one before promoting.

Security & compliance

Where the data lives, and who can touch it.

What's your compliance posture today?

SOC 2 Type 1 and ISO 27001 ready. SOC 2 Type 2, GDPR, HIPAA, and EU AI Act in progress; EU data residency in flight. Full status on the Trust center.

Where does customer data live?

Managed SaaS: single-tenant project storage in EU or US regions. Customer-VPC: data never leaves your AWS / Azure / GCP account — Asthra deploys into your tenant. Encryption: TLS 1.3 in transit, AES-256 at rest, customer-managed KMS keys in VPC mode.

How long is data retained?

Retention is customer-controlled. Source documents and project data live in your tenant for as long as you need them; Asthra doesn't retain copies outside your perimeter. Audit ledgers persist for the lifetime of the document and travel embedded in the .docx.

Will you sign a BAA?

Yes, on HIPAA-bound engagements. Reach out and we'll send our standard BAA alongside the security packet.

What about the EU AI Act?

Asthra is deployed as a high-risk AI system under the AI Act framework. We maintain technical documentation, conformity assessments, and risk-management documentation aligned to Annex III. Available on request.

Integration & deployment

How Asthra fits your tooling.

How long does deployment take?

Managed SaaS: same day after security review. Customer-VPC: 1–2 weeks for the first deployment, including Terraform install, KMS configuration, and Microsoft 365 add-in publishing. Security review runs in parallel.

Does Asthra integrate with Veeva or eTMF?

We support source-document ingestion from Veeva Vault, SharePoint, S3, and eTMF systems via API and connector. Drafting still happens in Word, but source documents stay in their authoritative location.

SSO and provisioning?

SAML 2.0 and OIDC for SSO. SCIM for user provisioning. Role-based access control with separate roles for writer, reviewer, QPPV / qualified evaluator, and admin.

Can we export the audit ledger?

Yes. The ledger is embedded in the .docx as a side-channel attachment, and can also be exported as JSON via the API. The format is documented and stable across versions.

Commercial & pilots

How we engage.

How does a pilot work?

30 days, scoped to one document type and one product / trial / device. We do the heavy lift on integration, template mapping, and writing-rule tuning. You bring real source documents and a real deadline. At the end, we benchmark Asthra's draft against your existing process — section by section.

What does pricing look like?

Annual subscription, tiered by document volume and team size. Pilots are fixed-fee. We share full pricing once we understand your team's mix of document types and current cycle times — happy to send a quote after a 30-minute scoping call.

Who owns the IP in the drafts?

You do. Drafts produced with Asthra are your work product, no different from documents written manually. Asthra holds no rights to your content, citations, or audit ledgers.

Do you work with CROs?

Yes. Several pilot partners are mid-tier CROs serving sponsor clients. CRO deployments support sponsor-isolated projects so a CRO writer can serve multiple sponsors without data crossover.

Still have questions?

The fastest way to answer the rest is a live demo. We'll work from your real document type.