Merck, marketer of the world’s biggest oncology drug Keytruda, is launching a new lung cancer screening campaign aimed at picking up cases of the disease earlier in the hope of boosting survival rates.
The patient-focused campaign—“Focus on Your Lungs: A Screening You Don’t Want to Miss”—is an unbranded awareness and education project that is running primarily as a website but also has three social media influencers attached to it who all share videos about lung cancer screening.
The central aim of the campaign is to boost screening rates for lung cancer in those 50 years or over. This disease is the leading cause of cancer death among both men and women, making up almost 25% of all cancer deaths in the U.S., but fear and stigma are stopping many from coming forward to be checked for the disease.
“In 2021, only around 5% of people who were deemed high risk [of lung cancer] actually got a screening,” said Ali Kresge, executive director and head of consumer marketing at Merck Oncology, in an interview. She added that only 19% of all lung cancer cases are diagnosed before the cancer has spread, showing how critical early detection is.
While COVID depressed screening rates, Kresge said there are inherent issues with lung cancer screening that are putting people off. “We want to normalize screening for lung cancer; there is the reality of screening, and there is the fear and the stigma and a lack of awareness,” she noted.
The stigma, she explains, is that lung cancer is often connected to smoking, and therefore people think it is their fault they have the disease and are reluctant to seek help.
There is also the fear of screening itself. Kresge said that some believe screening is painful and invasive and involves needles. In reality, screening is just a low-dose CT scan that takes a detailed picture of the lungs and only takes a few minutes.
This is why on the new campaign website, Merck tapped three influencers to talk about screening and break down the stigma and the fear. One influencer, Veronica, described on the website as a “supermodel, wife, mother and blogger,” actually has a YouTube video of her getting scanned and talks through the experience.
“We did that because we wanted to take away the misconceptions around screening, namely that it’s painful and takes a lot of time,” Kresge said of Veronica’s screening. “It’s quick, there is very little radiation from the scan, and there are no needles,” she exclaims, noting many people even in her own family believe checking for lung cancer must be painful and involve invasive procedures.
There are also downloadable guides to help patients talk to their doctors, information on potential symptoms of the disease and a “screening quiz” that can assess whether you are at a higher risk of the disease, with links to local screening centers.
Keytruda made $17.18 billion last year, up a massive 20% on 2020 and making it one of the biggest-selling drugs in the world and the biggest-selling cancer therapy.
It has multiple oncology approvals including skin, head and neck, blood, cervical and breast cancers, but lung cancer indications are the jewel in the drug's crown. Keytruda is one of only a handful of drugs developed over the years that is able to move the needle in a disease with such a high mortality rate.
Merck worked with Real Chemistry and several cancer charities to help create the campaign, though it did not reveal how much it has spent on Focus on Your Lungs in total. There is no direct branding around Keytruda within the site or the videos, with Merck’s name only appearing as the creator of the site. The hope of these types of campaigns are, however, to boost detection and diagnosis, therefore getting more patients into doctors’ offices, which has the affect of upping cancer drug use, including therapies like Keytruda.
In the last year, other lung cancer drug marketers including AstraZeneca and Roche have also launched new campaigns aimed at boosting screening and diagnosis rates for lung cancer.