Some of medicine’s most important stories happen at a scale no camera can reach. For the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, WebMD and Medscape, Pixeldust made them visible: how genetic therapies travel to the cells that need them, and how the immune system can be turned against cancer.
A mechanism of action animation has two audiences to satisfy at once. Scientists and physicians need every structure, receptor and pathway to be right. Everyone else, from patients to donors, needs to follow the story without a biology degree. Pixeldust builds each film from the research up: reading the science, scripting it in plain language and reviewing every step with the client’s experts.
For the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, the story was why delivering genetic therapies to the lungs is so hard. The film travels from a patient’s lungs through a thick layer of mucus, past the airway’s defenses and down to the receptors on individual cells, where a delivery vector has to dock before the therapy can do its work. For WebMD and Medscape, the subject was the immune system itself: how T-cell therapies find and destroy lymphoma cells, and how B cells are depleted, told so that patients and physicians can each follow it.
Read more about what goes into a mechanism of action animation, or explore our medical animation services.
Mechanism of action animation for patients, physicians and nonprofits
A companion film for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation surveys the next generation of genetic-based therapies for cystic fibrosis. Each approach gets its own clear visual language, so viewers can compare the strategies side by side and understand what each one is trying to fix.
For Medscape’s audience of physicians, Pixeldust animated the mechanisms of B-cell depletion with CAR-T cell therapy and T-cell engagers. Precise, labeled 3D shows how each treatment brings immune cells and their targets together, in just over a minute.
For WebMD’s patient audience, a short animation answers the question in its title: how does this therapy kill diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL) cells? The style is bright and calm, so a frightening subject becomes something a patient can understand.
A companion piece explains how the therapy targets primary mediastinal B-cell lymphoma (PMBL), in the same visual style, so patients with either diagnosis see a consistent, reassuring story.
Frames from the films
