Standard of Care (SoC)
The currently accepted treatment approach that a new therapy is positioned and compared against.
Standard of care is the treatment approach a medical community currently accepts as appropriate for a given condition, based on the best available evidence at the time. It's a moving target. What counts as standard of care for a disease area shifts as new therapies get approved and older ones fall out of favor.
For a pharma brand, standard of care is the reference point for almost every positioning claim. A new therapy gets described as an addition to standard of care, a replacement for it, or something used alongside it, and that distinction carries real regulatory weight. Implying superiority over standard of care requires head-to-head or comparative evidence to back it up, not just a shared indication. Getting that framing wrong is one of the more common reasons a promotional claim gets sent back during MLR review.