Improving Access to Treatment Remains a Challenge in AML, Says Dr Jeffrey Lancet

Much work is needed to address inequities and gaps in care access for patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), said Jeffrey Lancet, MD, chair of the Department of Malignant Hematology at Moffitt Cancer Center.

Transcript

Where are there opportunities to address disparities and improve health equity in the treatment of AML and other hematologic cancers?

I think being able to focus efforts and research on treating underserved patients with these very difficult and challenging diseases is going to be critical to the success of our overall mission to improve outcomes in leukemia patients.

Certainly, we need to do a better job at offering clinical trials to underserved patients who often are underrepresented—or I should say close to always underrepresented—in most large clinical trials. And that deprives those patients of the opportunity to receive potential cutting-edge therapy before it's officially approved, but also denies us, the medical academic community, the opportunity to understand how these new drugs work and all types of patients, because there may be differences and how effective therapies might be from one population of patients to another. So creating equity through both availability of therapy and availability of clinical trials, to me, is really critical to advancing the field. And I think we have a long way to go on to achieve that. But certainly, efforts towards making these new drugs available to patients in underserved communities is going to be very important.

And to that effect, being able to lower the cost of care is certainly going to be very important, as well, because [the] more out-of-pocket expense associated with these drugs, the less likely it is that underserved, or disadvantaged, or poor patients will be able to access these drugs. So there's a lot of a lot of moving parts here, but I am concerned about potential inequity in care when it comes to treating very serious, aggressive diseases with complicated therapies that are much more difficult to administer in the community setting or that require a lot of patient expense. So these are major concerns that we have to deal with as a health care community for sure—not just for AML, but for all cancers.