There is an oil made by the human body called sebum. It protects the skin. Too much of it can help produce acne. It is an ordinary scientific word with the comic misfortune of sounding mildly forbidden. Most healthcare agencies would handle that problem by saying the word carefully, then moving along. Core-Rx Communications built the joke around it.
In a connected-TV spot for Sun Pharma’s acne treatment WINLEVI, a family discusses acne at dinner. Every mention of “sebum” is bleeped and blurred. The parents look horrified. The children keep talking. Dermatologist Sandra Lee - better known as Dr. Pimple Popper - arrives to explain that the supposedly scandalous word is merely skin oil, and that the treatment targets its production. The gag does two jobs at once: it makes the science sticky and gives teenagers permission to discuss something they would rather avoid.
This is the operating idea behind Core-Rx. The agency does not remove the awkward part of healthcare communication. It looks for the human tension inside it. Then it builds the campaign there.
A spare bedroom with a point of view
Shana Robinson founded Core-Rx in 2010 after working in account leadership at established healthcare agencies. The first office was a spare bedroom. The staff was two people. By 2019, it had grown past ten full-time employees, moved into an Oak Brook office and reached the finalist list for MM+M’s Small Healthcare Agency of the Year. Some of the clients gathered in the agency’s first years were still with it nine years later.
That detail matters more than the origin-story furniture. Advertising shops often claim relationships; client tenure tests the claim. Robinson built the company around close account leadership, trust and access to senior people. The current shop has 33 employees listed publicly and a leadership group spanning creative, account service, clinical communications, compliance, digital innovation and technology.
Then came the conspicuous growth year. In 2025, the agency says it increased its workforce by 66 percent, doubled its client roster and moved to downtown Chicago. It added a chief creative officer, Jason Elias, and a senior vice president of digital innovation and technology, Arek Zarycki. By the agency’s count, it won seven accounts and served 14 active business clients. For a firm that markets proximity, growth creates a delicate test: can it add capabilities without adding distance?
“Clarity takes more thought, not more words.”Shana Robinson, on communicating benefits and risks in pharmaceutical advertising
The product is judgment
Core-Rx calls itself a life sciences agency, which is accurate but incomplete. It is also a translation shop. Its customers are pharmaceutical, biotech and healthcare brand teams. Their raw material may be a mechanism of action, clinical result, safety requirement or patient behavior. Core-Rx turns that material into brand strategy, positioning, messages, campaigns for clinicians and consumers, websites, videos, social systems, field tools, training, interactive modules and live experiences.
The menu is broad because the client problem rarely stays in one channel. A claim approved for a sales aid must still make sense on a phone. A patient story must survive a legal review. A television idea has to become social content without losing the premise. Core-Rx makes money the conventional agency way - project fees and continuing relationships - but what it sells is coordinated judgment across those transitions.
Its published service mix is revealing: execution accounts for 45 percent, creative 25 percent, experiential 20 percent and strategy 10 percent. The glamorous agency fantasy is that the big idea is most of the job. Core-Rx’s own numbers say otherwise. Most of the job is making the idea work, repeatedly, in the formats where clinicians and patients actually meet it.
Proof, not posture
The WINLEVI work provides the clearest public trail. Core-Rx and digital partner Think It First helped build a consumer website explaining a topical acne medicine that works differently from familiar treatments. The site won Gold at the 2023 MM+M Awards. In 2024, Sun Pharma extended the idea into connected TV with Lee, three spots, paid social and online video. “Family Dinner” made the strange word the setup, then used the explanation as the payoff.
The agency’s range shows up elsewhere. For Kedrion Biopharma, Core-Rx and Tim Peters and Company created “AchievABLE with GAMMAKED,” a professional campaign about the movement challenges caused by CIDP, a rare neurological disorder. The work focused on small daily activities that treatment may help patients reclaim and won Bronze in PM360’s 2026 professional campaign category. Years earlier, Core-Rx’s pro bono campaign for Wellness House’s Garden in the City gala won PM360 Bronze in philanthropy.
These are not identical briefs. One needs humor for teenagers and parents. One needs precision around mobility and rare disease. One supports a cancer-wellness nonprofit. The repeatable part is not a look. It is the search for a concrete human behavior that can carry the medical story.
What another team can borrow
The most portable lesson is to begin before the slogan. Find the fact that a real person would stumble over, laugh at or avoid. Put the regulatory and clinical specialists close enough to the first draft that they can shape the route, rather than merely close it later. Then carry one human tension through every channel. In the WINLEVI work, “sebum” is not trivia attached to the campaign. It is the bridge from embarrassment to mechanism to treatment.
The second lesson is organizational. Senior attention only differentiates a smaller agency if senior people remain in the work. Core-Rx’s challenge after its 2025 expansion is the same one faced by every growing boutique: preserve direct judgment while adding enough systems to deliver. Its new digital and creative leadership suggests that the company understands the tension.
The approach is not universal. Humor needs a genuine audience truth, a subject that can bear the tone and a client willing to protect the idea through review. A rare-disease education brief, a crisis communication or a grave safety message may demand a quieter device. The useful principle is not “make medicine funny.” It is “make the difficult part legible.” Sometimes the right result is a laugh. Sometimes it is a small movement a patient wants back.
Core-Rx sits in the crowded middle of the healthcare communications market: larger than a freelance collective, smaller than a network agency, broad enough to deliver integrated work and specialized enough to live with scientific and regulatory constraint. Its competitors can offer greater scale. Its answer is fewer layers, senior access and the speed of an independent operator. That proposition works only as long as the people remain visible in the product.
The name on the door now belongs to a downtown Chicago agency rather than a spare-bedroom experiment. But the most convincing evidence of what Core-Rx does is still one uncomfortable word at the dinner table. The family hears something forbidden. The scientist hears skin oil. The agency hears an opening.