The Cellular Lymphoma Handshake

Challenge one: showing why both targets matter

Epcoritamab is a bispecific antibody. One arm targets CD3 on T cells, the other targets CD20 on B cells. Neither target on its own produces any effect – it's only once the antibody has engaged both that anything happens.

The first task was helping the audience get comfortable with this mechanism from the ground up. It's exactly the kind of foundational understanding a mechanism of action animation needs to establish before anything else can land.

Our approach was to show the process as a straightforward, ordered sequence:

• Both arms bind to their respective targets at the same time, forming the trimeric complex. [[00:44]]
• Only after complex formation does T cell activation begin. [[00:57]]
• Activation leads to T cell-mediated destruction of the CD20-positive B cell. [[01:17]]

Setting it out step by step, rather than as a single combined action, goes some way to showing why this drug needed to work differently to a conventional monoclonal antibody, and why both targets play a distinct part rather than one simply reinforcing the other.

Challenge two: showing how combination treatments differ

As epcoritamab's approval has broadened, it's increasingly being used alongside other treatments rather than on its own. That brought a different kind of challenge: helping an audience see how several treatments work together, when each is doing something mechanistically distinct.

Our approach was to set each mechanism out alongside the others. The combination isn't epcoritamab with extra treatments layered on top – it's closer to three separate mechanisms working in parallel, each doing something the others don't.

For that to land, the audience arguably needs a decent grasp of how epcoritamab works on its own first. That grounding is what allows the other two mechanisms to read as genuinely different, rather than more of the same – which, in turn, is what the treatment decision tends to hinge on.

In summary

Neither of these challenges is particularly unique to this project. Any treatment working through more than one mechanism, increasingly used alongside others, tends to run into some version of the same problem: how to help an audience keep pace with the science, without losing sight of what actually matters. It's the kind of problem medical animation is well suited to solving.