A new campaign kicking off during October’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month is aimed at raising awareness of the health disparities facing Black breast cancer patients and providing care tailored to their specific needs.
According to its launch announcement Tuesday, the “Care for HER” campaign is a collaborative effort from a pair of nonprofits supporting breast cancer patients: Touch, The Black Breast Cancer Alliance and Unite for HER. The campaign is presented by Daiichi-Sankyo and AstraZeneca, while Merck serves as a gold-level sponsor and Eli Lilly, Pfizer and Guardant come aboard as community sponsors.
In the campaign’s awareness-raising piece, both of the nonprofits are spending the month filling their social media feeds with educational information both about the impacts of breast cancer on the Black community—especially as, according to the American Cancer Society, Black women have the lowest five-year breast cancer survival rate of any race or ethnicity—and about the benefits of integrative care and culturally tailored nurse navigation support for patients.
Meanwhile, the campaign will also offer those services free of charge, thanks to the net proceeds of its sponsorships. Breast cancer patients can apply for the support online and, if accepted, will be able to access 24/7 personal nurse navigation services and up to $2,000 worth of integrative therapies like acupuncture, massage, counseling and more.
Those services may help patients “manage side effects and symptoms, adhere to treatments better, and improve their quality of life,” Sue Weldon, CEO and founder of Unite for HER, said in the announcement.
“Our vision is that every Black individual diagnosed with breast cancer will feel the support of a loving community, and will have access to comprehensive integrative oncology support, education, services, and tools that enrich their health and well-being,” Weldon said, adding, “Together, we can make a difference in the lives of Black breast cancer patients.”
To start, the campaign will focus on enrolling Black breast cancer patients in Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and the Raleigh-Durham region of North Carolina, before expanding into other cities next year.
Daiichi and AstraZeneca’s sponsorship of the patient support campaign comes shortly after the duo began rolling out the first direct-to-consumer campaign for their breast cancer therapeutic Enhertu.
As with the Care for HER campaign, improving education and awareness around breast cancer is a core goal of the Enhertu “Not Today” promos. In addition to informing viewers about the drug itself, Dan Switzer, head of Daiichi’s U.S. oncology business, recently told Fierce Pharma Marketing, the companies are also hoping to paint a more accurate picture of life with breast cancer.
“If we hear back through market research, through focus groups that patients are seeing it, patients are connecting with it and, as importantly, those who surround them are getting a better appreciation for what it’s like to live with the disease—that’s how we’ll know we’ve been successful,” Switzer said.