Beth Bell
HCP Marketing Director – COVID-19, U.S. Respiratory & Immunology
AstraZeneca
Revealing the Culprit Behind Severe Asthma
Thymic stromal lymphopoietin (TSLP) is part of the cytokine family and plays an important role in the inflammatory cascade of the airways in asthma patients. However, this discovery was only made about 20 years ago so most physicians were not trained on it in medical school. In fact, before Beth Bell got involved, there was only about 9% awareness of what TSLP even was among allergist and pulmonologist. Beth and her team worked to raise awareness over 75% before the launch of Tezspire, the first approved asthma treatment targeting TSLP.
When COVID disrupted their plans to educate physicians at live congresses, they instead partnered with ET Global to create an interactive virtual booth that brought users into a “detective office” and took them through an investigation behind the cause of severe asthma. Visitors could search and discover clues, gather information, download clinical data, and even integrate the main suspects: eosinophil, IgE-producing B Cell, and neutrophil. However, all those suspects pointed to TSLP as the main culprit.
Once they achieved increased awareness of TSLP, the next step was developing a tool to help physicians educate their patients about how this impacted their asthma. Beth worked with Bionical Solutions to create an in-office patient counseling tool in the form of a plastic display of the inflammatory cascade with tabs that could be pulled out to revel more information while also lighting up that area on the display. For example, there is a tab for the various triggers behind asthma, the airway epithelium, TSLP, the downstream cascades activated by TSLP, etc. Furthermore, it includes a tear pad with more information for patients as well as QR code that takes patients to a video on the Tezspire patient website.
HCPs have loved the tool and AstraZeneca has been pleased too—the company recognized the brand team with an Excellence Award for the successful launch. Plus, the company moved Beth to a new brand, the launch of its new pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for prevention of COVID-19 (formerly Evusheld), to help create a similar tool about the importance this COVID treatment still has for immunocompromised patients.
