Dr. Chino talks with Dr. Navneet Majhail and patient advocate Laurie Adami about CAR-T therapy, an advance cancer treatment that biologically engineers a patient's own T-cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. This discussion will be based off the JCO OP article, "Outpatient Administration of Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapy Using Remote Patient Monitoring," on which Dr. Majhail served as lead author.

TRANSCRIPT

Dr. Fumiko Chino: Hello, and welcome to Put into Practice, the podcast for the JCO Oncology Practice. I'm Dr. Fumiko Chino, an associate professor in radiation oncology at MD Anderson Cancer Center with a research focus on access, affordability, and equity.

CAR T-therapy is an advanced cancer treatment that biologically engineers a patient's own T cells to recognize and kill cancer cells. It has shown remarkable benefits, leading to long-term remission or even cure for select patients with hematological cancers that have not responded to other treatments. Primary trials were exclusively conducted in the inpatient setting due to high risk of quick onset and life-threatening toxicities requiring close monitoring and immediate treatment. Advances in symptom monitoring and care delivery have allowed the introduction of outpatient CAR T, which is cost saving and more patient centered. I'm happy to welcome two guests today to discuss this promising operational shift.

Dr. Navneet Majhail, MD, MS, serves as the Physician-in-Chief of Blood Cancers at the Sarah Cannon Cancer Network, where he oversees 10 transplant and cellular therapy programs that collectively perform over 1500 transplants and cellular therapies each year. He is the first author of the JCO OP manuscript, "Outpatient Administration of Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell Therapy Using Remote Patient Monitoring," which was published earlier this year.

Ms. Laurie Adami was President of the LA-based Interactive Data's Fixed Income Analytics Division when she was diagnosed with stage four follicular lymphoma at age 46. From 2006 to 2018, she was in continuous treatment and received multiple lines of therapy, including three clinical trials. In 2018, she received treatment number seven, a clinical trial of Kite CAR T-therapy. Thirty days later, she was in complete remission, where she remains today. She is an active patient advocate and legislative policy advocate for several not-for-profits.

Our full disclosures are available in the transcript of this episode, and we have already agreed to go by our first names for the podcast today.

Navneet and Laurie, it's so wonderful to speak to you today.

Dr. Navneet Majhail: Thank you. Looking forward to this conversation.

Laurie Adami: Thank you, Dr. Chino. I guess I'm supposed to call you Fumiko. Great to be here today. Great to be alive, first of all, and great to be here on this call. Thank you for having me.

Dr. Fumiko Chino: I think with everything you've gone through, Laurie, we all go on a first name basis.

Now, Navneet, do you mind starting us out with a short history of CAR T in the US, including the side effects and the precise care delivery needs that were the initial reasons why care was limited to the hospital?

Dr. Navneet Majhail: So, Fumiko, you laid an excellent background as to why these therapies are done in the inpatient side and what they are. I mean, it's really exciting, right? These are what we call transformative therapies in oncology or medicine as a whole. You're taking patients with very, very advanced diseases who traditionally would have gone on to hospice, where you can potentially put around half of these patients into very deep remissions, and maybe some of them might be cured of their underlying malignancies.

Now, having said that, as you alluded to in the introductions, most of the trials early on were focused entirely on the inpatient space for a few reasons. One was the unknowns. These were early therapies, unknown side effects, you needed to have that monitoring. The second, some of the very early work that was done with these therapies, it was clear you can have some potentially severe and fatal side effects, like cytokine release syndrome, what we now call ICANS, or immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome. You have issues such as HLH, hemo-phagocytic lymphohistiocytosis. These are some really fatal, potentially fatal and severe side effects, which really needed close monitoring on the inpatient side.

As things have evolved, obviously we've gotten smarter at selecting patients. The constructs have improved as well, where the incidence and the severity of these toxicities has gone down. And as we become smarter overall, both from a supportive care, patient selection and technology perspective, certainly there are opportunities now for us to look at delivering these care where patients can access these therapies better.

Dr. Fumiko Chino: That's a wonderful summary, and I know at this point, I believe over 300 sites are Foundation for the Accreditation of Cellular Therapy accredited to deliver CAR T-cell therapy. So, we really have gone very much into the space where we're trying to expand access to these therapies.

Now, Laurie, I know that your CAR T was in 2018 on a phase two trial at UCLA, but your treatment started in 2006. Do you mind walking us through what that was like for you? How did it go? What was required in terms of travel, time, for, I know, again, just not just yourself, but also your family, and it's through the treatment and then also the recovery? I'm presuming that you had to be in the hospital, for example, for your CAR T for at least a week, if not longer.

Laurie Adami: Yeah, I was diagnosed in 2006 and spent 12 years in continuous treatment, all in Los Angeles where I live. When I did my CAR T, I was also in Los Angeles, so that made it easier for me, as well as my family, because when I went in for CAR T, I was just at the UCLA main hospital, which is about 20 minutes drive from my home.

The