Hi, I'm Samer Al-Hadidi. I'm an assistant professor at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, where I see myeloma patients. This ash we presented on our experience with weightless for patients who are listed for CAR T product in a commercial use. As you all know, CAR T are used in advanced patients where they have limited options for treatment. We looked at all our patients that were listed for the last year to get their CAR T at our institution and at also University of Wisconsin. We have above 80 patients listed at that period, and we wanted to see how long patients are waiting to get their CAR T if-ir-ease-a-slot, the CAR T product, and how they will do if they get their CAR T delayed. So unfortunately, we found that one out of four patients died while waiting for CAR T, and that signifies the need for more access for patients and also signifies that those patients are in immediate need for something to help. In our data, in the first three months, only 4% of patients were able to get CAR T from the time of listing. That got better at the time of 12 months where around 50% of them got CAR T. Now, the time from the time listing to actually getting the CAR T was around four months, and patients waited for around five and a half months before they got actually the CAR T from the time listing. So this study signifies actual real-world data on how much patients are waiting to get CAR T, and it will tell us that the need is there to improve access for care for patients across the U.S. to try to provide this therapy for patients in need. Patients like CAR T therapy because it's associated with treatment free interval if it works. So I think this is very important to work with the pharma companies to get more access to patients. I do personally believe that this will get better because pharma companies now are doing a better job in manufacturing. And as we heard in this ash, there are multiple technologies that we're using nowadays to help in making CAR T products in a quicker way and more accessible. In this ash, we presented data on bispecific antibodies used in multiple myeloma and infection risk associated with that. We found that bispecifics are associated with increased risk of infection, and namely, grade three and grade four. And those seem to tend to be more in patients who receive BCMA directed bispecifics when compared to other source of mechanisms of action. We tried to highlight this finding to draw attention to the need of making specific guidelines to do infection profile access for patients who go into trials, and that includes preventing infections with viral infections, bacterial infections, and fungal infections. We believe this is extremely important because such therapies are coming to studies more frequently as we heard. And also, we have a new approval for one of them in the U.S. So that's very important to work on.
HealthTree • December 20, 2022