As a decision date on its proposed asset sale to Merz Therapeutics looms, Acorda Therapeutics still hasn’t lost its fighting spirit.
The company unveiled a new commercial for Inbrija last week, building on the “For the Fighters” campaign it launched last year. A treatment for Parkinson’s disease symptoms, Inbrija is an inhaled form of levodopa that’s prescribed on top of standard carbidopa/levodopa medications for Parkinson’s patients.
Inbrija is designed to be used during what are known as “OFF periods,” when the combination medications aren’t working and symptoms return; the drug can help ease symptoms in as few as 10 minutes, per Acorda.
The new 90-second ad follows two actor-portrayed Inbrija users, a swimmer and a boxer. As the commercial begins, they’re shown preparing for their respective hobbies, as Parkinson’s symptoms interfere with their gear: “So sluggish” is written on her swim cap, while “shaking” appears around his gloves.
In voiceovers, however, both patients share that, thanks to Inbrija, they’re “ready to fight.” They each take a dose from an inhaler and proceed with their activities—a water aerobics class for her and a sparring session for him—seemingly with their symptoms now minimized.
The new commercial comes about a year after Acorda debuted its first TV spot for Inbrija in April 2023. Though that ad followed a similar format, albeit with a golfer and a garden center worker, it described the drug as enabling the patients to “get back to doing what you love.” Acorda didn’t try on the “fighting” theme until several months later: In August, it launched a new online campaign dubbed “For the Fighters,” which it said at the time “honors the fighting spirit” of the Parkinson’s community and which features imagery of the swimming cap-clad woman from the new commercial.
Acorda put out the latest ad at the end of May, just a few days before a bankruptcy court in New York is set to rule on the company’s proposed sale to Merz.
In early April, Acorda announced that it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and entered into an agreement to sell off “substantially all” of its assets to Merz for a total of $185 million, including the rights to Inbrija and multiple sclerosis treatment Ampyra, known as Fampyra in Europe and Canada.
Merz was cast as the “stalking horse bidder” in the sale, a format typically used to make a bankruptcy auction more competitive. That ultimately didn’t happen for Acorda, however, as a late May filing in the bankruptcy case confirmed that no other qualified bids had been received by the May 28 deadline, resulting in the auction’s cancellation and Merz’s being named the winning bidder. A hearing to approve the asset sale to Merz is now set for June 7.
The bankruptcy filing and sell-off—which also necessitated the layoffs of the 97 employees at Acorda’s Pearl River, N.Y., manufacturing site, as well as the company’s delisting from the Nasdaq—comes after several years of less-than-stellar sales for the company.
Inbrija, in particular, had a lackluster launch. Though, around its 2018 approval, the drug was originally projected to have a sales peak of $800 million, Acorda later downsized those estimates to land somewhere between $350 million and $500 million. But even those scaled-down figures still have yet to come to fruition: Inbrija brought in just under $31 million in 2022 and, per Acorda’s latest annual report (PDF), around $38.4 million in global net revenues for 2023.