Academic/Community Collaboration May Help Facilitate CAR T Therapy Access

CancerNetwork^® spoke with Ogechukwu Egini, MD, MS, hematologist and oncologist and assistant professor of medicine at the Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson (RWJ) Medical School, about how implementation of CAR T-cell therapy into clinical practice has impacted patient care at community practices at the 2024 Annual Oncology Clinical Practice and Research Summit.

Egini initially highlighted an increase in communication among academic and community oncologists, touching upon educational sessions created for community clinicians regarding CAR T referral. He additionally stressed that many community practitioners know to refer patients with lymphoma based on their response to first-line treatment or if they have recurrent disease.

Furthermore, he emphasized a greater degree of engagement with community practices, stressing that practices such as bridging therapy and lymphodepletion could be conducted in a community setting to prepare a patient to receive CAR T therapy at an academic clinic.

Transcript:

I would say that [with] the RWJ model, what we have done is to communicate a lot more with many of our community doctors. We provide educational sessions on CAR T. We enlighten community physicians, community oncologists, and hematologists [about] when to refer patients for CAR T. In the lymphoma setting, it would be when [first-line therapy failed for a patient], whether they have recurrent disease or have disease that did not resolve with the initial treatment.

Many of our community oncologists know when they treat patients who need specialized treatment to send them quickly to us. One of the other things we have also done is to start engaging with them. As far as some of the treatments that might be needed prior to CAR T, [there is] bridging therapy, which [tides patients] over until they get CAR T. [There is also] lymphodepleting therapy, which is the treatment they get just before the CAR T to suppress the immune system, in simplistic terms. Some of our community doctors are able to do that and then get the patients to us for CAR T. Of course, we are looking towards starting a CAR T program in another region, and this is what is being led by some of my colleagues here.

Reference

Matasar M, Dillard S, Egini O, McEntee N, Phillips A. CAR T-cell therapy via a community lens. Presented at the 2024 Annual Oncology Clinical Practice and Research Summit; November 15-16, 2024; New Brunswick, NJ.