London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine

Could a 40-second clay animation of a cartoon character with a hole in his side, designed and created in a student's bedroom, save thousands of lives?  This is what injury researchers at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine are banking on with the help of TRAN-MAN, which is being posted online today.

After an international clinical trial (CRASH-2) showed that a cheap drug called tranexamic acid – which helps reduce clot breakdown - could prevent thousands of accident victims from bleeding to death, the researchers were disappointed to find that doctors both in Britain and world-wide were still not using it more than a year later.

“We published two papers in The Lancet medical journal but we realised that not enough doctors in Brazil, China, Russia have read about it as it is not being used widely in hospitals - even in Britain only a small fraction of the patients who could benefit were actually treated,” said Professor Ian Roberts, who co-ordinated the trial.  “The drug companies, who can spend millions on marketing, could see the health gains but not the profit margins of a generic, off-patent drug. It was clear that if doctors were going to hear about tranexamic acid it was down to us to tell them.”

So Professor Roberts asked his 22-year-old nephew Hywel Roberts, an animation student at UWE Bristol, if he could make a short animated video that contained the key message for doctors. The challenge was to help them quickly see the benefits of treating bleeding patients after road accidents or violence.

The result is TRAN-MAN, a 40-second clay animation of a bleeding car crash victim with a medical voice over that has been translated into Chinese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Japanese and English. The video is being posted on YouTube and Tudou, one of the largest video sharing websites in China.

Hywel Roberts said: “I was shocked when my uncle told me how many lives could be saved if more hospitals and doctors used tranexamic acid. I didn’t realise how many obstacles there can be to patients getting the best treatment even after scientific research has provided the evidence. I enjoyed creating TRAN-MAN and hope he will help push things forward.”

The video can be found on the Lancet 

It is going online just a few days before the World Day of Remembrance for Road Traffic Victims (Sunday 20th November 2011), which highlights the devastation caused by road deaths and injuries around the world.