Feb. 28, 2023 Together with Patients
【February 28 is Rare disease Day.】 Sumitomo Pharma has been supporting RDD Japan’s activities
Some 300 million people in the world suffer from rare and intractable diseases. There are more than 6,000 kinds of rare and intractable diseases. In Japan, about one million patients are fighting against designated intractable diseases. For some rare and intractable diseases, however, progress has not been made in therapeutic and drug discovery research due to the low number of patients and their complex pathogenic mechanisms.
Rare Disease Day (RDD) is an international event held on the last day of February each year. RDD was first launched in 2008 in Sweden, aimed at improving patients’ quality of life through better diagnosis and treatment.
Today, RDD is held in about 100 countries, and various activities have been conducted in Japan since 2010. RDD is of increasing importance every year as an event that connects patients with rare and intractable diseases and their families and the public in general.
To raise public awareness of rare and intractable diseases, Sumitomo Pharma has been supporting RDD Japan’s activities since 2017.
Based on RDD Japan 2023’s theme “Speak, Spread and Share -Our Odyssey with RARE-,” we internally communicated the message that we need to know what kinds of rare and intractable diseases there are and what problems patients with such diseases are facing, and speak and spread such information to other people.
In addition, we solicited photos featuring RDD’s logo colors (green, blue, purple, and pink) and messages to raise public awareness of RDD from within the company and created posters (PDF) using collected photos, which have been posted in the company. Depending on the number of photos and messages collected, we make donations to groups of those suffering from rare and intractable diseases such as Network for NANBYO Children of Japan, Japan Patients Association, Fabry NEXT, Japan Parkinson's Disease Association, Japan Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis Association.
