Eli Lilly has thrown its weight behind a cause beyond the traditional remit of pharma companies. As the sponsor of an app for finding public restrooms, the Big Pharma is shining a light on just how common a problem finding the facilities is for people with ulcerative colitis.
Lilly, which sells the ulcerative colitis drug Omvoh, is the lead sponsor of the restroom-finding app that the Crohn’s & Colitis Foundation launched in 2022. The foundation developed the “We Can’t Wait” app in light of problems inflammatory bowel disease patients, who can experience urgent bowel movements, face when out and about.
Now, Lilly has gathered data to quantify the problem. The drugmaker collected responses from 1,800 U.S. adults, including 200 people with moderately to severely active ulcerative colitis, to understand the availability and accessibility of public restrooms.
Eighty-one percent of people with ulcerative colitis said it takes longer than five minutes to find a clean restroom. The figure is higher than the result in the general population, 73%. That difference is reflected in other areas of the data set, which show that while restroom access is a problem for many people, the challenges are particularly acute for ulcerative colitis patients.
A higher proportion of ulcerative colitis patients, 63%, than people in the general population, 38%, need to use the restroom frequently when they leave the house. And people with ulcerative colitis are almost three times as likely to have a restroom emergency, with 42% of patients reporting that experience. Almost 80% of ulcerative colitis patients said they had an accident as an adult.
The survey builds on Lilly’s long-running attempt to establish bowel urgency—the sudden and immediate need to have a bowel movement—as a point of difference for Omvoh in the competitive ulcerative colitis market. In 2022, Lilly staffers and external collaborators published a paper about their development of a patient-reported outcome measure for assessing bowel urgency in adults.
Lilly used the measure in phase 3 trials of Omvoh, linking the anti-IL-23 antibody to reductions in bowel urgency in the induction study that were sustained during the maintenance portion of the program. The evidence of Omvoh’s effect on bowel urgency sets the drug apart from other treatments, but, with Lilly posting sales of $26 million in the second quarter, that edge is yet to translate into market share.