What was Mary Bird Perkins looking to address?

So I think to start with, you know, we have seen this kind of flood of amazing, you know, cancer treatments really across oncology, but essentially in the treatment of blood cancers, particularly lymphoma, myeloma and some leukemias, you know, chimeric antigen receptor T cell therapy.

you know, these have now been approved for almost a decade.

But over the last 10 years, really, they've still been isolated to large academic centers, urban areas.

And what the end result of that has been is that, you know, less than one in five patients who meet indications to get these therapies that are even potentially curable, even get a referral.

And so we can talk about how wonderful all these medicines we have are, but really, if they're not getting to the patients that need them, you know, it's really not kind of serving its purpose.

So When I was brought over to Mary Bird Perkins a couple years ago, I was kind of tasked with setting up a CAR-T program in a community setting and really with a focus on administering these drugs for patients close to home so they don't have to travel anywhere from two to six hours that they were having to travel in our area for CAR-T therapy and not only be able to offer the therapy but really offer it in an outpatient setting to where they're able to go home each night during the initial phases of treatment.

Do you have any words of wisdom for others who might find themselves in a similar challenge? They have an issue, they'd like to meet it, but they don't think they have the ability to do it.