• by Les Luchter , February 15, 2026

Actor-comedian Will Forte has a brother-in-law, Doug, with Huntington’s Disease (HD), and they’re both now starring in an awareness campaign about the rare neurological disease from Teva Pharmaceuticals.

HD, probably most known as felling legendary folksinger Woody Guthrie, is hereditary, and Doug’s father passed away from the disease in recent years.

Teva learned about Forte’s connection to HD after he shared his story with Fox 11 Los Angeles in late 2024, Heather DeMyers, Teva’s vice president of U.S. innovative medicines marketing, tells Marketing Daily.

The result is the new awareness effort, which features a three-minute hero video, in which Forte explains that “Huntington’s is like ALS [AKA Lou Gehrig’s disease] and Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s” combined.

In the video, Doug notes that one HD symptom is chorea, manifested by “shaking or flailing or tapping.”

Teva says that HD affects more than 41,000 Americans, with about  90% of them developing chorea.

While Will and Doug’s story -- part of a four-year-old  Teva initiative titled “Honestly HD”--  is unbranded, the campaign’s hub at HonestlyHD.com does include one button that invites users to “discover a treatment for HD chorea,” that will take  them  to a page for Austedo, a Teva drug for that condition.

Austedo also treats Tardive Dyskinesia, which was itself the subject of a recent Teva awareness campaign featuring NFL Hall of Famer Terrell Davis in TV spots.

In any case, DeMyers calls “Honestly HD” “one of our most prominent and comprehensive public awareness campaigns to date” and says this is likely the first HD awareness campaign ever from a pharma firm.

The campaign is targeted at “advocates, patients and caregivers who already know about HD, as well as the general public who may not know as much about HD and its symptoms,” DeMyers says. “With Will’s help, our goal is to elevate awareness of HD and ensure that the HD community feels recognized, understood and supported.”

She adds, “Launching this campaign isn’t the end of the story for us. It’s a starting point. From here, we’ll continue listening closely to patient communities, caregivers, and healthcare professionals to understand how we can best support them and close gaps in care -- whether through raising awareness, driving medical research or uplifting their voices. We’ll know that we succeeded if we hear that even one person was positively impacted by our campaign.”

WPP’s Burson agency has worked with Teva on the Forte campaign.