Genentech animated short spotlights docs' trust in Vabysmo

In time for Mother’s Day, Genentech released a new Vabysmo ad suggesting that a great way to repay your mother for her years of love and support is with a prescription for the wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD) treatment.

“A Beautiful Sight” is a two-minute-long film that follows a mother and son—in Pixar-style animation—throughout several decades. The bulk of the heartwarming short is seen from the son’s point of view, with his mother always in sight as he takes his first steps, plays outside, learns to drive and heads off to college. Throughout his years of school, the mother appears in a framed photograph on his bookshelf, and, when he begins his medical residency, she pops up on his phone with an encouraging text message.

From there, just before the now-doctor can enter an exam room at a retina center, a voice-over chimes in: “Our loved ones shape our vision for the world. So when their vision is at risk due to wet AMD, how we care for them means everything.”

In the next scene, the shot zooms out, showing the son as a white-coat-clad ophthalmologist who walks into the exam room to find his mother—who gets a brief POV shot of her own to illustrate her blurred vision—waiting in the chair.

They embrace, and the image blinks away to share Genentech’s finding from a survey of 56 retina specialists. In the survey, 95% of specialists said they would use Vabysmo to care for the vision of their own loved ones with wet AMD.

That statistic served as a major inspiration for the short film, “along with true stories about retina specialists treating their parents and loved ones with Vabysmo,” a Genentech spokesperson said via email.

“A Beautiful Sight is unique in that we took one insight and built a story to move and emotionally engage three different audiences—patients, caregivers and retina specialists,” Erin Echter, Ph.D., director of patient marketing in ophthalmology at Genentech, said in a statement sent to Fierce Pharma Marketing.

“We wanted to flip the script on traditional pharma ads that focus on clinical aspects of treatment,” Echter continued. “We instead focused on the human experience and emotional connection to show that Vabysmo is not just a treatment, but one that retina specialists would trust for their own parents.”

Vabysmo has been approved to treat both wet AMD and diabetic macular edema (DME) since early 2022. Last fall, it received another FDA nod clearing it for use in treating macular edema following retinal vein occlusion.

The new ad arrives as Vabysmo’s sales continue to skyrocket, upping the ante in the ophthalmology market rivalry against Regeneron’s long-standing eye disease heavyweight Eylea and its newer higher-dose sibling Eylea HD. In wet AMD and DME, Regeneron and Genentech parent Roche each claim to market the standard of care.