Generative artificial intelligence has gotten a bad rap for churning out artwork featuring extra limbs, otherworldly creatures and scenery that defies every law of physics—but for Incyte, at least, the technology’s vast “imagination” is a major selling point.
In fact, the pharma is banking on generative AI’s ability to illustrate the unseeable: Incyte has launched a new campaign to raise awareness around the often hard-to-see symptoms of myeloproliferative neoplasms, or MPNs, accompanied by AI-created images that make invisible symptoms visible and create a visual representation of some patients’ experiences with the diseases.
Turning to AI for the project “allows us to illustrate the patient experience in a new and striking way,” Barry Flannelly, general manager of Incyte North America, said in a release.
The “Unseen Journey” campaign centers around four patients with MPNs, forms of blood cancer that start in the bone marrow, the most common of which are polycythemia vera, myelofibrosis and essential thrombocythemia. Their descriptions of what it’s like to live with MPNs were fed into a generative AI engine, resulting in images that capture the way the diseases can stifle their everyday activities and slow down their career aspirations, with each patient’s story captured in a short video on the campaign’s site.
The AI artworks are mostly ominous depictions of the symptoms. Chelsea P.’s fatigue, which often keeps her from leaving the house, manifests as a living room full of suffocating smoke and decaying plants while Dave S. experiences the symptom as feeling like he has to wade through “waist-high water” just to get through the day.
Ashlee P.’s brain fog, meanwhile, makes it feel like all her best ideas are trapped inside a frosted glass box, and Mickey T.’s sudden spells of fatigue show up as a birdcage that prevents his otherwise vibrant energy from flying free.
But it’s not all doom and gloom. To further illustrate the lives those symptoms are affecting, the campaign also includes AI-generated, uncanny valley-esque illustrations of each patient in happier times: Mickey at a football stadium, Chelsea with her guitar (pictured above), Dave on a sunny pier and Ashlee taking in a sunrise.
“MPN symptoms can be difficult to recognize and describe and every patient’s experience is different, which can sometimes create a challenge for patients, their loved ones and their health care teams to understand the impact of the condition to daily life,” Ann Brazeau, CEO and founder of MPN Advocacy and Education International, said in the release. “These AI-generated images paint a vivid picture of what it is like to live with an MPN, and I hope they will help create a new level of awareness and empathy for those with these conditions.”
Alongside the AI art, the Unseen Journey website also includes a link to the “Voices of MPN” website, where patients can register to gain access to a symptom-tracking mobile app.
Incyte’s MPN program includes one approved drug and another half-dozen in development. In 2011, Ruxolitinib, a JAK inhibitor that Incyte sells as Jakafi, became the first drug approved by the FDA to treat myelofibrosis.
More recently, the company has set its sights on earning another approval for an extended-release version of the drug that would offer a once-daily alternative to Jakafi’s current twice-daily schedule. It hit a roadblock last year, however, when the FDA rejected the formulation, issuing Incyte a complete response letter that cited “additional requirements for approval.”