AstraZeneca is hopping aboard the pickleball craze as its serves up a new marketing push for its asthma med Fasenra.
The injectable drug will serve as an official partner of the Professional Pickleball Association (PPA) Tour throughout the 2025-26 season, according to a recent announcement. That includes Fasenra’s being listed as a presenting sponsor of the Texas Open, which began in Dallas this week, and as the title sponsor of an October tournament that’ll be known as the Fasenra Virginia Beach Open.
The season-long sponsorship will also see AstraZeneca offer “interactive experiences” to help educate the PPA community about severe eosinophilic asthma. Fasenra has been cleared in the U.S. since 2017 as a maintenance treatment for people aged 6 and up whose severe asthma isn’t fully controlled by other medications, and it earned another nod last fall to treat adults with eosinophilic granulomatosis with polyangiitis, a rare autoimmune disease.
“We’re thrilled to partner with the PPA, taking an out-of-the-box approach outside of the typical healthcare ecosystem, to bring a greater understanding of eosinophilic asthma, a debilitating chronic disease that impacts 4 out of 5 adults with severe asthma,” Matt Gray, executive director of Fasenra for AstraZeneca, said in the announcement.
“We want to encourage patients to talk to their doctor about their asthma control and treatment options that might be right for them, which may help them get back to the things they love to do, including playing pickleball,” Gray added.
That’s been the theme of an ongoing direct-to-consumer campaign for Fasenra. Commercials released throughout the last year show social media posts depicting people who have been “sidelined by asthma” getting drawn out of the digital shots to return to their hobbies alongside loved ones.
One version of the ad boasts a pickleball theme. After being pulled out of his lonely photo at home, a man is shown hitting the courts with a group of friends, where he’s able to “get back to better breathing” and play the high-energy game, ostensibly thanks to Fasenra.
The pickleball-focused spot began airing at the end of December, Gray told Fierce Pharma Marketing, just a few weeks ahead of the PPA Tour sponsorship announcement.
This isn’t AstraZeneca’s first foray into the world of pickleball. Its cancer med Calquence served as the presenting sponsor of the 2024 Pickleball Slam, which featured a doubles match pitting tennis pros Maria Sharapova and John McEnroe against Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf.
And the U.K. drugmaker isn’t the only pharma capitalizing on the fastest-growing sport in the U.S. Back in 2021, Novo Nordisk put out its own pickleball-themed commercial for GLP-1 blockbuster Ozempic, and, last summer, IBSA tapped pro pickleballer James Ignatowich as a celebrity spokesperson for its Licart pain patch.