Bringing CAR T-Cell Therapy to the Community Setting

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.

You know, look, I think to kind of frame the conversation is that, you know, these drugs are moving earlier into lines of treatment, that they are likely going to become recommended first line therapies for a lot of these cancers.

And so if centers, whether they be community or academic, aren't offering these, you're really not offering patients a standard of care.

And so really, I think that the science is really going to force centers, whether they be small community centers or, you know, larger community centers to kind of quote unquote innovate.

Really, I think planning for this is going to be integral.

I generally advocate one is practices finding kind of a physician champion to really kind of quarterback the process and really whether that's an internal physician or or starting to look at physicians coming out of fellowship to act as that kind of physician champion is going to be the first step.

So I generally talk about, A, identifying practices, identifying a physician champion.

And then second to that is identifying kind of an administrative champion, because there's a lot of You know, insurance issues, staffing issues that are kind of more on the administrative side.

So really having kind of a dyad type partnership at the top to kind of build these programs is incredibly important.

That's a great perspective.

Did AI play a role in any way in this innovation?

Yeah, and so, look, I think we're all starting to learn how to use AI.

A lot of the actual standard operating procedures, typically things that had to kind of be written by hand were very kind of voluminous, time-consuming.

A lot of those were actually able to generate with AI and open evidence, and so use data-driven, citation-driven AI technology to help us with a lot of these administrative tasks that have been typically very cumbersome.

So, yes, absolutely.

I think, you know, AI has been helpful in building this program and removed, I think, a lot of the time and staff burdens.

What can the audience expect who attend your session at NOC this fall?

Yeah.

So what we really want to convey is that this is something that's doable, that this is not something that is kind of insurmountable, particularly in the community setting.