Animated Explainers Can Be Game-Changers in Cohort Recruitment

Beth Anderson, CEO, Arkitek Scientific

Success! The drug you developed has made it to the marketplace, and is being utilized by thousands of people, helping them gain relief from the disease the drug was meant to help alleviate.

If you get to that moment, you’re one of very few developers that actually do. As is well known in the pharmaceutical world, the ratio of proposed drugs and treatments to those that are successful in passing all the hurdles presented is miserably small.

One of the lynchpins in your drug’s journey from inception to final rollout is the clinical trial: a brutal gauntlet in recruitment, compliance, and retention. I think one of the reasons companies find this so hard is because the people you’re trying to reach don’t truly understand what you’re doing. Most people lack any science training beyond high school, if that. And in today’s climate, there’s an unfortunate abundance of skepticism surrounding anything scientific.

But there is a facet of society over the past 20 years that may be helping the situation – Hollywood, of all things. People have become extremely sophisticated in their consumption of great graphics and animation. They have come to expect visual explainers for literally every area in life. The online retail marketplace is a perfect example of this, where visual explainers and trainers can make a difference to the tune of millions in sales. Scientific animation can come in very handy in convincing a prospective trial entrant that this would be worth doing.

Putting science content that explains immunological processes out into the wider world helps peripherally in getting the lay public to potentially buy into scientific research. That’s what Nature did, when they mirrored the seven animations we did for them on their YouTube channel, availing millions of people of the chance to learn about the immunology of the lung, skin and gut, among other systems.

Biology is all about motion: no movement equals no life. How then, is it possible to adequately convey the specific processes and functions happening within the body when a drug or treatment is introduced? Explaining these things using text is very difficult to do, because one must whittle down the complex interactions to bullet points, which tend to paint a simplistic picture that doesn’t really get at what the drug is doing. And it’s easier to lengthen a person’s attention span with compelling animation than with static text.

I’ve looked at many stills over the past three decades that attempt to encapsulate a multi-stage process. Some succeed, but most unfortunately just make the viewer even more confused.

One of the best things about animation is that you can pick your battles. In any biological system, complexity reigns, and it’s critical to reduce the amount of scientific “noise” to a minimum. What is data to us is unfortunately noise to many others.

There are two aspects to this that are key: identifying the “players” within this story that are most relevant to getting the information across, and speaking to the potential ramifications for the patient, if they decide to embark on the trial.

Many years ago, we were approached by Nucleonics, a company out of Cambridge, MA that was developing what I believe was the world’s first RNA vaccine, against HEP-B. In the lead-up to recruitment of patients for the trial, their IRB insisted that they develop a 3D animation to help explain what RNAi is, because the physicians administering the injections were not familiar enough with the technique or the science behind it, since that field of research was fairly new.

As far as I can tell, this animation was also a world’s first example of 3D animation being used in a clinical trial. We created what is, by today’s standards, a very simplistic animation to help potential patients understand and therefore agree to participate.

Sadly, they ran out of funding before they could move forward once the trial was done and I never heard the outcome of that research. But they DID have an easier time recruiting a cohort.

The future is coming. One day AI and computer modeling may be able to accurately predict what certain drugs will do to living systems. And research into lab-grown biological systems like specific cell lines is gaining ground. But those capabilities don’t yet and may never replace the standard clinical trial. We still need people to agree to test these drugs in their own bodies. It can be a tall order – many are skeptical, scared or completely unaware of the necessity. Explaining it to them is extremely important. And apart from the importance of bringing new life saving, and life enhancing drugs and treatment to markets, my hope also is that it helps to foster a better sense of altruism among people, to help others they will probably never meet.

Teasing out the most important parts of a drug’s story and presenting it in a friendly, engaging and informative manner, is our job. We’ve been at this for two and a half decades, and we understand how to convey complex information to many kinds of audiences, spanning the spectrum from technically scientific to thoughtful lay perspectives.

There’s always a fascinating story at the root of any research. Would it help you for people know about that? Would their appreciation for the potential importance of the resulting drug or treatment help you get more committed cooperation leading to more robust data? The result might speed your science to market.

Beth Anderson is the CEO of Arkitek Scientific