During the 2018 Association of Community Cancer Centers National Oncology Conference, Olalekan Oluwole, MBBS, MPH, discusses some of the challenges he has encountered with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy.
Oluwole says that many patients have progressive disease and need chemotherapy while the CAR T-cell therapy is being produced, as their disease tends to grow quickly. Currently, there are 2 commerically-approved products for patients with large B cell lymphoma –axicabtagene ciloleucel (Yescarta) and tisagenlecleucel (Kymriah). Giving one of these agents to bridge the gap in therapy is a way of keeping the patient's disease controlled while the insurance approval is ongoing or the product is being manufactured.
Another challenge is that CAR T-cell therapy does not benefit every patient. Therefore, there is still a need to define the patients who do not benefit from these therapies, Oluwole says.
