A new campaign for Astellas Pharma’s Izervay is aimed at opening retina specialists’ eyes to the unique role they play in their geographic atrophy (GA) patients’ lives.
The “Partners in Protection” initiative, spanning print, digital and social media channels, showcases three real-life retina specialist-patient pairs. Campaign images show doctors joining their patients in hobbies like line dancing, cooking and playing golf, and the HCPs also appear in videos to discuss the mindset shift required for GA treatment.
The campaign comes about two years after Izervay and its chief rival, Apellis Pharmaceuticals’ Syfovre, became the first intravitreal (IVT) injections approved by the FDA to treat GA, an advanced form of dry age-related macular degeneration (AMD) that can cause irreversible vision loss.
In an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing, Jake Schumacher, Astellas’ commercial head of Izervay, described how the company came to realize that there was a need for greater awareness among ophthalmologists of how their approach to treating GA will differ from using IVT injections for other common eye diseases. Regeneron’s Eylea and Roche’s Vabysmo, for example, may at least partially restore vision loss in wet AMD and diabetic macular edema.
“What we’ve found to be true, and this is supported by research, is that physicians view their role in many ways like fixers, fixers of a problem,” Schumacher said. “However, geographic atrophy, unfortunately, to this point, can’t be reversed in the same type of way.”
So, he continued, “much like in other diseases like oncology or Alzheimer’s disease or most of medicine, it’s actually [a matter of] helping the retina community to understand that their role really is to help to protect whatever vision and whatever portions of the retina that are left so patients can live as full of lives for as long as possible.”
That mindset shift will come “little by little,” he suggested: “Through a well-designed campaign like this, speaking in an empathetic way both toward the physician and what the patient needs, we’ll slowly chip away and get there.”
Beyond that, the campaign is also meant to encourage earlier treatment of GA. Schumacher noted that IVT injections haven’t yet become the standard of care in GA, which is often either treated very late and “only in the most desperate patients,” or not at all.
“By framing them up as ‘Partners in Protection’ with their patients, which the campaign does a nice job of doing, they start to see themselves as wanting to have the conversations with patients earlier, once those patients have a GA diagnosis, and have the conversation about treatment earlier as well, so they can step in and treat more patients,” he said.
In that way, the campaign closes the loop created by Astellas’ ongoing patient-centric Izervay push, which is aimed at raising awareness of an available GA treatment and encouraging people with the disease to talk to their doctors.
The first direct-to-consumer TV ad for the drug debuted in the fall of 2024 and uses an unforgettable parody of the 1975 hit song “Low Rider” to push the message that Izervay can slow down GA progression—messaging also central to a more recent team-up with social media star Babs Costello about the med.
With patients more aware of treatment options and retina specialists willing to become partners in the process, “they both can coalesce around the idea of appropriately stepping in and getting treatment or giving treatment,” Schumacher said.
The exec also hinted that the overarching theme of the “Partners in Protection” campaign’s imagery—with physicians looking on as GA patients are able to “live a full life, however that patient defines it”—will carry on through Astellas’ next consumer-facing ads for Izervay.
“If you look into the future of what we’ll showcase with our future DTC campaign, it could be as simple as just being able to see their grandchildren do what they love to do, which in itself brings such joy to the grandparents,” he said. “That human element of what sight enables and, by being a partner in protection, how good [physicians] can feel about enabling that in their patient is really reason enough to step in and treat and not try to just look to fix the disease.”