This Chewing Gum Can Save a Life

No blood work or swabs required

Chew on this. Five minutes of chewing Hero Gum can potentially save a life. The collab from adam&eveDDB New York, Labcorp, Doublemint and Gift of Life makes DNA collection a breeze. (We know a place that’s loaded with gum and DNA.)

The campaign took two years to complete and it launches at scale on Aug. 1 at Citi Field during the Mets vs. Giants game. Hundreds of kits will be given to fans. An animated video from Unsaid Studio will run on the stadium Jumbotron:

Every three minutes, someone in the U.S. is diagnosed with blood cancer. This campaign makes joining the stem cell registry easier and without the need for blood work or a cheek swab.

The initiative hopes to target a younger, diverse audience, as only 30 percent of patients find a match in their family. Seventy percent rely on donor registries.

A :60 below highlights how the kit works:

“We’ve been working with Gift of Life for a couple of years now and really came to understand that at the core of what they offer relies completely on donors,” says Brynna Aylward, CCO of adam&eveDDB U.S. “Following Covid, we knew how people felt about the swab method of HLA extraction, and we thought, “what if we can make this more, everyday? More fun?” We started thinking about gum as one of many potential collection methods, suggested it to Gift of Life and their lab partner, and then after months of testing they gave us the green light. It was one of those rare occasions in advertising where the idea informs the science.”

Labcorp performs testing for the registry and found that cheek cells left on chewed gum can identify HLA tissue markers. Those are used to match donors to patients battling leukemia and lymphoma among other diseases.

“The science aspect of this had to work perfectly, first and foremost,” Aylward tells Muse. “Allowing the proper time for testing to take place was crucial. We had to keep the planning going, the excitement levels up. Working on the partner collaborations was not easy to do over such a long period of time, but the love for the idea we all have and the difference it can make is what kept pushing us. Because Gift of Life is a not-for-profit, we had to be as scrappy as possible. The initiative could not eat up a lot of funds as those were needed for helping to match donors with cancer patients in need of stem cell transplants.” 

Kits will be distributed at high-traffic events, college campuses, community centers and online.