2-Minute Drill: Shameless Plus From the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting

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Following the 2023 ASCO Annual Meeting, Ruemu E. Birhiray, MD, Hematology Oncology of Indiana; Sameer A. Parikh, MBBS, Mayo Clinic; Javier Pinilla, MD, PhD, Moffitt Cancer Center; and Nakhle Saba, MD, Tulane University School of Medicine, share their shameless plus after the meeting.

The participants had 1 minute each to give their response.

Kahl: So before I mentioned that we encourage you to talk about yourselves, before we close out the day, 1 minute each. Give us your shameless plug from the meeting, the higher you boast, the more points you get. Dr. Saba, you finished out last. So you got it first.

Saba: Yeah, too much CAR Ts and cell therapy. This is great. However, [there have been] no CAR [T-cell therapies] in Louisiana before 2023. And I'm very excited to announce that Tulane University became the only center in Louisiana that is fact accredited for CAR T. We received that back in March. And that followed really hard work from the transplant team and IECT committee that that I am chairing. So we are currently contracting with device CAR companies and multiple clinical trials, whether with autologous or allogeneic CARs to really bring this long awaited technology to Louisiana to start providing this service in the next 3 months. It's unbelievable. We still don't have it. But very soon.

Kahl: Perfect. Alright, 60 points. Dr. Pinilla go ahead.

Pinilla: Well, I have to go into a similar theme. But I think there's going to be a very interesting competition between BiTES and CAR T in the next years. And I think we're still debating ourselves, our center who do a lot of CAR T, we're still struggling to say, “Are we going to use BiTE before the CAR T? Are we going to use it right after the CAR T?” I think BiTES are really going to compete with CAR T in many, many areas, whereas [Dr. Saba would say], CAR T is not available, or there's not really a possibility for insurance or for many other reasons. So, I think there's going to be a very interesting era in the next years because there is so many BiTES in myeloma in low-grade lymphoma, and aggressive lymphoma, we're going to really see very nice competition between these 2 technologies. And we don't know who's going to win or how we're going to sequence.

Kahl: Absolutely, we’ll go 50 points. Dr. Birhiray?

Birhiray: Yes. So along the themes of bispecifics and CAR T therapy, I practice in community. And so it became more obvious to me in the past year that a lot of community providers either did not participate in clinical trials for bispecifics or for CAR T therapies, and that patients were missing out on these therapies in the community. So in March of this year, I held a summit and I created an organization which is called the Cancer Network. Cancer Network means community oncology, cellular therapy network. And we had our first meeting in Indianapolis in March. And we have a nice meeting coming up in September. What we're trying to do is teach people in the community, how to set up programs to deliver bispecifics and CAR T therapies so that all of our patients will have access to these new and emerging therapies. And we are proud that our next meeting is on September 30, 2023.

Kahl: Amazing 70 points. Great job. All right, Parikh?

Parikh: This is going to be very hard to beat all these wonderful accomplishments. I'm going to go very slow here and very small. So I was very happy about an abstract that we presented at ASCO, that showed that an older patient population, patients over the age of 80 years and treated for frontline CLL with a novel agent did better compared to standard chemo-immunotherapy, or chemotherapy, or even single-agent antibody-based regimens. And so I think, of course, retrospective studies, notwithstanding all the criticisms about it, but we think that that, you know, does tell us that novel agents really have played a huge role in the impact, you know, the overall survival of patients with CLL in the front line setting.

Kahl: Absolutely. So we’ll go 50 points.

Transcription edited for clarity.