Hi, my name is Lisa Herms.
I'm an associate director of drug research with Ontada.
We're very pleased to present a couple of abstracts and posters for this year's ASH conference.
One of them is a real-world study about the utilization and uptake of bispecific antibodies for the treatment of relapsed refractory multiple myeloma, specifically in the community oncology setting.
The first bispecifics were approved in October 2022.
And now they are one of the preferred treatment options for patients after at least four prior lines of therapy.
But despite these treatments being available, there’s really limited real-world data so far looking at the actual uptake and experience with these therapies, particularly in the community oncology setting.
This is quite relevant because there are clinical, operational, and resource demands to ensure the safe administration of these therapies.
So we were quite interested in exploring this experience.
We did a retrospective observational cohort study using our iKnowMed electronic health records database.
We looked at 564 patients receiving bispecifics or other treatments in the fifth line or beyond, and we tracked the utilization of bispecifics over time, as well as what kinds of drugs were being used.
We then did a high-level comparison of the characteristics between patients receiving bispecifics and those who did not.
And we found that despite being approved just in October 2022, by the data cutoff in July 2024, there was very rapid uptake of bispecifics, both in absolute numbers and proportionately compared to other therapies. This is really encouraging.
We also looked at the characteristics of these patients and found that, for the most part, they were fairly comparable.
However, bispecific patients tended to be a little younger and had a better performance status, which is expected as novel therapies are introduced, and as patient and provider experience with these therapies grows.
We do expect this to shift over time, but it was an interesting signal for us to pick up on.
We’re excited that even in the community setting, where there are some challenges with administering these treatments, bispecifics are being used, and the utilization is increasing.
We’re looking forward to continuing our research, extending our follow-up period to increase our patient count.
We plan to do more specific comparisons between bispecific and non-bispecific patients, which will give us a better sample size.
This will help us understand who is getting these treatments and who is not, and why.
The ultimate goal is to link this information to outcomes.
So, not just whether bispecifics are being used, but also the experience and outcomes of using these therapies.
If we see any plateaus in utilization or any barriers to the uptake of these treatments, we want to understand those as well.
We looked across a very large, geographically diverse network of practices in the United States, and we saw good uptake there.
One of the next steps is to explore some of the social determinants of health to see if there are any disparities in access, particularly in immigrant or rural versus urban settings.
This is something we're very keen to explore further.
I think we just need a little more time for these therapies to take off.
There are infrastructure needs at the practice level—practices need to develop playbooks for administering these treatments, and that’s going to take time.
That’s why we believe extending our follow-up will help uncover some of these issues.
In fact, this of one of the motivations of the research, just to get it that exact question.
HealthTree • December 23, 2024