A professor is counting on the power of the internet to promote a blood-clotting drug which he says could save up to 140,000 lives a year worldwide.
Professor Ian Roberts enlisted the help of his nephew, animation student Hywel Roberts, to come up with car crash victim Tran-man. A 40-second clip of Tran-man is being launched on YouTube and its Chinese equivalent, Tudou - to a potential audience of many millions.
The clip shows Tran-man with a hole in his side bleeding to death but is saved when given the blood-clotting drug tranexamic acid.
Prof Roberts says while the cheap, generic drug is available widely, doctors and hospitals around the world are not aware of its power - meaning thousands of road accident and trauma victims are unnecessarily bleeding to death.
"If all hospitals in the world gave trauma patients this drug, 140,000 lives a year can be saved," Prof Roberts, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, said.
He added: "We published two papers in The Lancet medical journal last year but we realised that not enough doctors in Brazil, China and Russia have read about it. It's not being used widely in hospitals and even in Britain only a small fraction of the patients who could benefit were actually treated."
He said because it is a cheap generic drug with many manufacturers, pharmaceutical companies were not prepared to market it. "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," he said.
"It was clear that if doctors were going to hear about tranexamic acid it was down to us to tell them."
The cartoon clip will link viewers to the findings of the Crash-2 tranexamic acid clinical trial.
The trial was coordinated by Prof Roberts and involved more than 20,000 adult patients in 274 hospitals across 40 countries. Results published last year found the drug - given as a simple injection - was highly effective and had no adverse side-effects. It costs about £3 ($4.50) per gram.
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