Broadway actor and reality show star Tommy Bracco used to hide multiple inhalers around the set of his show in case an asthma attack sneaked up on him mid-performance—and, with all the singing, the dancing and the gymnastics, it’s not surprising. His new collaboration with Sanofi and Regeneron for Dupixent tells the story of his journey in the most appropriate way—as theater.
The campaign, which launched this month, features an eight-minute video (plus longer for the small print) which lives on the Join Lung Zone website and is (sort of) a one-man show traveling from Bracco’s childhood bedroom to the hospital where he spent a lot of time as a kid, then of course on to a Broadway set. From there, Bracco takes the viewer to meet his doctor, Ujwala Kaza, M.D., who introduced him to Dupixent to discuss the importance of speaking with a doctor to control moderate to severe asthma.
Kaza had worked with the Sanofi/Regeneron alliance team on Dupixent in the past and was the one to introduce Bracco to the team, and they thought he was the perfect choice.
“It really was just a great collaboration and an opportunity to build and share a very relatable story for his journey with severe asthma and then finding Dupixent and the impact that Dupixent has had on his life and his career,” Eric Krapf, executive director for U.S. respiratory and GI marketing at Regeneron, said.
Along with the video, Bracco will share shorter snippets of the video on TikTok, Instagram and Twitter. There are plans in place to work with five other asthma influencers to lead them to the site. But the team is really happy with Bracco and what he brings to Dupixent marketing, and Krapf calls it “a living campaign” with Bracco being a part of it for the foreseeable future.
Tim Cope, head of U.S. asthma marketing at Sanofi, agrees.
“There are a million moderate severe, uncontrolled asthma patients right now that are going through similar experiences to what Tommy was going through, not realizing that there's an opportunity for them to do better … those patients who are compensating, and not doing the things that they want to do; (this is to) really motivate and inspire them that there's more that they could do to get better control of their lung health,” he said in an interview.
Dupixent is a multitasking blockbuster. It recently landed a new indication as the first and only medicine to treat eosinophilic esophagitis in patients 12 and older. Plus, there’s another late-stage trial showing promise in even younger children.
Sanofi’s sales projection is now 13 billion euros at peak, and Dupixent recently nabbed the first U.S. approval for prurigo nodularis and is being studied in other diseases including chronic spontaneous urticaria, hand and foot dermatitis and chronic pruritus of unknown origin.