What role can bispecific antibody therapy play in eliminating geographic and other medical disparities?     

If bispecific antibody therapies could be administered in community clinics/oncology centers, more people would have access to state-of-the-art quality treatment and care.

Bispecific antibody therapy treatments are available for off-the-shelf administration but not available for administration in community oncology centers. These medications require significant medical expertise and infrastructure (inpatient oncology service that can admit and monitor patients during step-up dosing) to safely administer.

Participating in or supporting clinical trials can help make new therapies more widely available. 

If eventually moved to the community clinics, patients will no longer have to travel to an academic center to receive this effective and potentially life-saving medication, so even those patients who live in rural areas or who are unable to travel due to costs will be able to receive a gold standard-of-care treatment for their multiple myeloma. 

Financially, bispecific antibodies could potentially be more affordable than CAR T-cell therapy. This doesn’t mean that bispecific antibody therapy will be the cheapest drug on the market, because the treatment is long and the more time the patient spends on the therapy, the more it increases the cost. Work will still need to be done to make the bispecific antibody therapies more affordable. 

However, financial resources can allow patients with no insurance or high-deductible insurance a good chance of receiving these drugs at a low personal cost.