A year after earning FDA approval for Kisunla, Eli Lilly is shining a light on the anti-amyloid Alzheimer’s disease therapy in its first branded campaign.
The “Light Up Tomorrow” direct-to-consumer push, which launched this week, homes in on one actual patient’s experience with Kisunla to emphasize the importance of early Alzheimer’s detection—which can in turn help identify those patients who might benefit from Kisunla and direct them toward the therapy, according to Laura Steele, senior vice president of Lilly’s U.S. neuroscience business unit.
“Kisunla is indicated for somebody who has early symptomatic Alzheimer’s, so when you think about mild cognitive impairment or mild dementia, early detection matters," Steele said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing. "So the first thing we want to do is we want to raise awareness and try to change the paradigm: Let’s focus early on Alzheimer’s, not late."
“Then there’s the piece on, how do you help patients recognize that activation and recognize that there’s hope, because there’s a treatment available,” she continued. “That’s the ‘why’ you should go and seek care if you’re noticing memory and thinking issues.”
A minute-long TV ad centers on Pat, who’s shown packing for and embarking on a trip with her husband to visit their daughters.
“I finally admitted that I have memory and thinking issues," she says in the ad. "My doctor said it was early Alzheimer’s disease. With getting the early diagnosis and treatment, I’m doing all I can. And now, with Kisunla, I see a glimmer of hope.”
As a voiceover reads off information about Kisunla and its side effects and contraindications, the family is shown visiting an art exhibit featuring giant screens displaying glowing, starburstlike lights. Pat concludes the ad by reiterating her optimistic message: “I’m doing all I can for my Alzheimer’s, and that gives me hope.”
“We were grateful and honored to partner with Pat and her family so that they could share their personal experience to empower people to take action for their memory and thinking issues and to consider treatments like Kisunla that can slow the progression of the disease, and really highlight that hope does exist in Alzheimer’s disease with treatments like Kisunla,” Steele said, adding, “That’s where the theme of ‘Light Up Tomorrow’ came from—instilling hope in the promise of early detection.”
The commercial is accompanied by a cover of The Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun”—which echoes not only the “hopeful and beautiful” message of the ad, but also the middle syllable of Kisunla’s name, as Steele noted.
The campaign is aimed toward patients “earlier in the disease state,” the exec said, and will go out via a variety of channels, including TV, online, social and display ads.
To up its chances of converting those views to actual Kisunla prescriptions, Lilly is taking a geotargeted approach with the ads’ placement: “We’ve really been focused on the areas where a patient can have the most optimal experience from a pathway standpoint. So, we look at availability of diagnostics and availability of specialists who are actually diagnosing and treating patients, to ensure that when you’re activating patients and consumers, they actually have a path to seek evaluation and testing for memory and thinking issues,” Steele said.
Indeed, along with tracking brand awareness and prescription count, she said, Lilly will also be measuring the campaign’s success by monitoring diagnostic growth rates, both in terms of widely available blood-based biomarker tests and more advanced diagnostics that require a referral to a neuro department.
Following its initial approval in early symptomatic Alzheimer’s disease last summer, Kisunla recently picked up another FDA nod for a new dosing regimen aimed at improving its safety profile. The drug is administered once a month and has a list price of close to $700 per vial; in earnings presentations so far this year, Lilly has reported $21 million in Kisunla sales for the first quarter (PDF) and $49 million in the second quarter (PDF).