Living with chronic myeloid leukemia (CML) can feel as if you’re lugging around a massive weight everywhere you go—and Novartis is hoping to give doctors a taste of that experience so they can better understand their patients’ burden.
To do so, the Big Pharma has added a high-tech feature to its booth at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s annual meeting, which kicks off in Chicago on Friday. Attendees at the conference who stop by Novartis’ booth will be able to look in a mirror and, thanks to the power of augmented reality technology, see themselves holding a huge boulder, simulating the experience of living with CML.
The “ReThinkCML” campaign is part of Novartis’ broader work “to elevate the patient perspective and treatment decisions in the treatment journey,” Gail Horwood, the company’s U.S. chief marketing and customer experience officer, said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing.
“Specifically for CML, while the good news is that this is treated as a chronic disease now, and it’s not the same outcomes as we’ve had in the past, the fact is that patients experience a lot of fatigue, nausea, muscle and skeletal pain and even diarrhea,” Horwood said. “There’s a lot of things that come along with the treatments that are on the market today that really impact their daily lives, and what we wanted to do with this experience is to help physicians see and put at the front and center what the patient experience is like.”
The immersive experience at ASCO, then, will allow clinicians to virtually step into their patients’ shoes, with the help of motion- and skeleton-detection technology powered by depth and infrared sensing. Meanwhile, related imagery from the “ReThinkCML” campaign—sans AR tech—will be placed in other areas of the conference and its surrounding areas.
The campaign’s associated website features the boulder-laden imagery, as well as a variety of text and video resources for doctors and patients with CML, both describing the possible side effects of common treatments for the disease—with a special focus on tyrosine kinase inhibitor (TKI) therapies—and presenting data showing that sticking with treatments despite those side effects can lead to greater efficacy.
Though the site includes Novartis branding, there’s no mention of the company’s own TKI, Scemblix, which has been approved for certain CML patients since late 2021 and is meant to offer an alternative to other standard-of-care TKIs.
Novartis is billing the immersive mirror setup as the first time a pharma company has used AR to generate patient empathy.
Horwood said Novartis was inspired by the growing ubiquity of mixed-reality technologies—in mediums like Apple’s Vision Pro headset and the Sphere immersive concert venue in Las Vegas—to integrate the technology into its outreach efforts.
“What we’re trying to do is take what people are starting to experience in the real world and bring that into our communications and the way we interact,” she said, noting that Novartis worked on the initiative with an agency partner, who brought the AR technology to the company. “The brief was around bringing the patient lived experience to the forefront so that the physicians could experience that as the patient does … and then the technology was layered in.”
Elsewhere at the pharma’s ASCO booth, Novartis is also adding a mixed-reality aspect to its long-running “More Than Just Words” initiative, which is dedicated to addressing racial disparities in healthcare, and specifically in the treatment of Black women with breast cancer.
Horwood said the booth will feature a virtual reality tool that “brings to life microaggressions that African-American patients experience while they’re going through the medical ecosystem.” The VR experience was built based on interviews with patients, clinicians and campaign advisors and, once again, is aimed at encouraging greater empathy for the patient experience and, ideally, more productive conversations about breast cancer risk and care.
Horwood reiterated that the multiple interactive elements of Novartis’ ASCO presence represent the company’s goal of “trying to elevate the patient perspective throughout everything we’re doing,” including by branching out beyond traditional media channels and taking advantage of every “touchpoint” where it can reach physicians and other stakeholders within the healthcare ecosystem.