Knowledge is empowering, but only if the listener is engaged.

The challenge was providing an accessible explanation that gives patients and HCPs the “aha!” moment of realization about on the scientific difference of ENTYVIO.

What if we could shrink ourselves and go into the colon to see the treatment in action?

Introducing the ENTYVIO Virtual Reality (VR) Experience. We developed a custom experience that takes users inside the colon – Fantastic Voyage style - illustrating exactly how the drug interacts with the body. The virtual architecture was custom designed to show the interplay between the MAdCAM-1 and the alpha-four-beta-seven molecules (key molecules affected by ENTYVIO) within the colon. The journey is guided by captions and narrations as users become immersed in the dynamic universe of the inner colon, they can look anywhere, even behind them. This turns the inevitably jargon-heavy explanation into an immersive and visual experience that’s immediately engaging.

We debuted the experience to sales reps at Takeda’s National Sales Meeting to test the concept. While oculus rift and virtual reality have become buzz topics within consumer electronics, this is one of the first instances of it in application in the pharmaceutical industry. In following months, we shared it publicly at the American College of Gastroenterology (ACG) Annual Meeting and the Advances in Inflammatory Bowel Disease (AIBD) conference.

Consumers will be able to access the experience through ENTYVIO’s website. They will receive a complimentary branded cardboard viewing device accompanying the downloadable app with the experience embedded for both iOS and Android. This makes it easily accessible and relatively inexpensive to distribute.

Through Takeda’s National Sales Meeting and the various HCP targeted conferences, we’ve wowed hundreds sales reps and HCPs. Perhaps the most amazing of these outcomes is that this immersive experience incited HCPs to tell us that we need to get this into patient hands to empower them with something that can help them understand what’s happening inside their own bodies. As a result, we’re creating scalable and inexpensive way using virtual reality to create a new dialogue between HCPs and patients about UC and CD.