The first commercial for Johnson & Johnson and Legend Biotech’s Carvykti focuses on the numbers that make up a multiple myeloma patient’s life, both before and after treatment with the CAR-T therapy.
The two-minute ad, which began running Wednesday on networks and streaming platforms like AMC, Paramount+ and YouTube, starts by listing the 47 doctor appointments, 66 injections and 1,804 pills that its star, Marvin, has had to deal with between his multiple myeloma diagnosis and first relapse.
After undergoing Carvykti’s one-time infusion, however, Marvin’s stats take on a much more cheerful tone: According to the commercial, his post-Carvykti life has featured 14 playdates with his grandchildren, 76 grilled kebabs, eight lost socks and “12 relapse-free months and counting,” allowing him to celebrate another birthday surrounded by family.
The idea for the ad came from conversations with people with multiple myeloma, many of whom reported constantly juggling a variety of numbers in their heads—from lab results to appointment times—June Lanoue, J&J’s president of U.S. hematology, said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
“Not only are they living with multiple myeloma, but they’re almost burdened with this overwhelming sense around managing their life in numbers. So, we decided to turn the numbers around,” Lanoue said.
“If a patient lives with multiple myeloma, our vision and mission and our ambition is to obviously ensure patients get the best therapy possible. If they could get Carvykti, they could turn those numbers to something that they own,” she continued. “It’s all about empowering patients, in terms of turning the numbers to their power and helping them live their life.”
The commercial is meant to speak primarily to patients being treated in the community setting, where awareness of Carvykti is still “very low,” according to Lanoue. That realization made targeted patient outreach—in the form of the new TV ad—“very urgent,” she said.
The inaugural commercial for the therapy comes more than three years after its first FDA approval in early 2022. It has since received additional nods allowing it to be used as early as the second line.
In addition to boosting awareness, the ad is also aimed at empowering patients to take a more active role in their treatment. As the exec explained, “In this market, when the patient sees something that they’re interested in, they do act on it.”
The commercial’s star plays a key role in reaching that target audience. Rather than casting an actual patient, J&J and Legend created Marvin as a composite figure to “mimic the general population of multiple myeloma,” she said, as the disease most commonly affects people who are Black, male and over the age of 65.
Beyond relating to viewers through his demographics, Marvin also links Carvykti to a particular lifestyle and mindset: “We also wanted to show that it’s a patient who is active and has a life and is not ready to get defeated and give up in terms of what he wants to do for the remaining part of his life,” Lanoue said.
With that in mind, she underscored the ad’s claim that Carvykti can help people live longer without disease progression than those on standard therapy. She pointed to data presented at this year’s American Society of Clinical Oncology meeting showing that 33% of patients who received the therapy remained progression-free for at least five years after the infusion.
“It’s nothing but remarkable to see patients, who’ve been heavily pretreated, with a single infusion of Carvykti that maintains remission five years later,” the exec said. “So, we’re very, very excited about the long-term durability and efficacy of this one-time infusion, and we hope that the path towards getting more patients towards a cure would be really remarkable.”