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Hyde Park - and Chicago - End Up as Face of Controversial Cancer Drug

By Sam Cholke | December 21, 2015 6:16am
Opdivo Commercial
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Opdivo

HYDE PARK — A commercial spotted filming in Hyde Park over the summer has started airing and it turns out to be for a controversial cancer drug.

The 1½-minute spot for Opdivo splashes the brand logo in massive letters across Jackson Shore Apartments, the luxury lakefront cooperative at 5490 S. Shore Drive where Al Capone reportedly once lived, among many other Chicago scenes.

While Reuters reported Wednesday that British regulators have rejected use of the drug because of its high cost, Hyde Parkers took to Facebook to debate whether lakefront scenes in the commercial had been “Photoshopped.”

A scene that shows a couple walking along the lakefront appears at first glance to be Promontory Point — but there’s no railing around the Point. Did some crafty editor decide to use some postproduction magic to fix up the fiercely protected limestone revetment?

But savvy spotters online identified the scene as the southern shoreline at 63rd Street Beach. The lack of septuagenarians in swimming caps probably should have been the first clue it wasn’t the Point.

That cut between South Side landmarks makes it more fascinating for the chronically intellectual on the south lakefront. Let the peeling of the onion of neighborhood politics begin.

Why is the middle-class black couple in their outdated '90s Buick Roadmaster station wagon shown staring with concerned looks at luxury condos in Hyde Park, only to reappear later smiling on a beach in Woodlawn with their golden retriever?

If one really wanted to get a conspiracy going, there is also the fact that the location scout was a former Hyde Parker.

But the obvious and probably more reasonable explanation is that 63rd Street Beach is just more picturesque for a film crew with the beach’s lush trees on a broad lawn as lounging fishermen dip their poles into the lake.

And there is no way to park a station wagon near the water at the Point, as the scene seems to require.

While there are plenty of ways to make hay out of the commercial’s depiction of Chicago, the world outside the south lakefront is having a serious debate about the merits of the drug.

A full year of treatment for lung cancer with Opdivo can cost up to $150,000, according to reports in the Wall Street Journal.

The drug has also been approved for use in combination with other cancer drugs to treat melanoma, increasing the cost even more and and also increasing the reported side effects while adding a little longer than four months for patients without the cancer progressing.

On Wednesday, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in Britain and cancer researchers there told Reuters it was “very clearly too expensive.”

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