Finalist
SMA: A Race Against Time
Summary of work
Currently, the infrastructure for urgent diagnosis of Spinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), a rare, devastating genetic disease that affects babies from birth and can cause death before their second birthday, is not established across Europe. This means the responsibility of spotting the disease’s complex signs before it’s too late falls to caregivers and Primary Care Practitioners (PCPs). Therefore, an innovative education of both audiences was needed to help them recognise warning signs, accelerating SMA identification and treatment.
Telling this story came with the challenge of clearly visualising the disease’s complicated symptoms without the possibility of replicating them in healthy babies or filming real patients due to either ethical or pandemic-related reasons. The solution? Delivered through a digital ecosystem, first-of-their kind CGI animations were created to accurately and emotively depict the disease’s critical warning signs, cutting through the noise of the saturated infant communications landscape.
The ‘SMA: A Race Against Time’ campaign brings the complicated and subtle symptoms of SMA to life and translates the confusing terminology into uncluttered messages that were adapted to both audiences. The result? A critical turning point in the SMA communications sphere that has already had lifechanging outcomes for patients.
Judges’ comments
The SMA: A Race Against Time entry involved content focused objectives and the judges particularly liked the depictions of medically accurate symptoms through CGI, as it added a new dimension to understanding and diagnosing the disease. The judges also commended the floppy infant test being brought to life in order to take away some of the subjectivity and they added that the story-telling aspect of this entry was very engaging.
