Subcutaneous Cancer Immunotherapy at Home: Transforming Trials and Patient Care

Announcer:

You’re listening to Project Oncology on ReachMD. On this episode, we’re joined by Dr. Jorge Nieva, who’s an Associate Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Southern California’s Keck School of Medicine. He’ll be discussing how at-home subcutaneous immunotherapy delivery models can impact clinical trials and patient care. Here’s Dr. Nieva now.

Dr. Nieva: 

Delivery of medicines at home in the decentralized fashion has a number of implications for clinical trials and healthcare delivery. Clinical trials, of course, are very tightly regulated, and administering these medicines at home in a clinical trial environment requires a number of regulatory safeguards to ensure that investigational products are being used correctly, dispensed correctly, and that patient safety and data collection is done appropriately. Fortunately, we now have a number of smartphone-based tools and patient-reported outcome metrics that can be used to capture toxicity data and capture the patient experience to ensure that if we’re doing home administration with a decentralized clinical trial, we’re actually getting the patient data that’s necessary to create an appropriate package for regulatory review.

From the standpoint of care administration, decentralized models of cancer care have a number of advantages for patients, particularly for patients who are living in rural environments and for patients of lower socioeconomic status who may have challenges with transportation and who may benefit from the support provided by having in-home nurse delivery for cancer care. Having nurses come to the patient’s home gives them a tremendous amount of insight as to what’s going on with their home environment. They are wonderful tools for improving patient education and helping the patient’s health literacy overall with any sort of complex medication and medication design by spending a great deal of time with the patient in that environment. So from the standpoint of care delivery overall, the home administration model really has a number of advantages over bringing the patients to a centralized center. Having care delivery at home also increases the amount of family interaction that happens with the nurse and with the drug delivery process itself. More and more, our cancer treatments are complex, and so the more we can involve patients’ families and other ears to listen to instructions and other toxicity warnings, we really benefit our patients’ care overall. 

Announcer:

That was Dr. Jorge Nieva talking about the potential impacts of at-home subcutaneous immunotherapy delivery models on clinical trials and patient care. To access this and other episodes in our series, visit Project Oncology on ReachMD dot com, where you can Be Part of the Knowledge. Thanks for listening!