Oncology Advances Bring CAR T Local, but Community Practices Need Support: Nini Wu, MD

Among the most promising trends in oncology over the past year is the growing ability to deliver advanced therapies, such as chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T and bispecific treatments, closer to patients’ homes, according to Nini Wu, MD, MBA, chief medical and development officer at Navista, Cardinal Health.

“I think the 2 areas that really are exciting relate to the newer therapies, or rather, therapies which are now ready to bring into the community,” Wu said in an interview at the 2025 Community Oncology Conference, organized by the Community Oncology Alliance (COA).

She also emphasized the critical role of community oncology in ensuring access to care, highlighting the ongoing challenges these practices face, from reimbursement pressures to the cost of implementing new technologies. Wu underscored the need for continued support to sustain community-based cancer care as the field evolves.

This transcript has been lightly edited; captions were auto-generated.

Transcript

What emerging areas in oncology have gained the most traction over the past year?

When new therapies first come out, depending on how complex the delivery is—and I'll give it as an example: CAR T therapies or bispecific therapies—they are typically given through a research clinical trial or in a center where there's a high level of support. That's completely appropriate. With the increasing advances in the capabilities of clinical practices, as well as greater experience, what we're going to see is that these therapies that originally required patients and their families to travel for and stay far away from home for not only days but maybe a month or 2 months, and that's a huge challenge.

We're bringing that closer to home, so these therapies can be delivered in their community or within a shorter transportation time frame from their community. So, that's really exciting. We're seeing much more of that. We're also seeing increasing capabilities in the delivery of precision medicine, so increased testing availability, understanding of the testing, education around it, so that patients can receive the right therapy at the right time through access to the testing. Those are incredibly exciting and important. Of course, there are so many different technologies, as we talked about.

What role do you see community oncology playing as the field advances and access to care evolves?

I think it's really important for people to understand that community oncology will continue to be a mainstay of the delivery of care, and we need to support it, which means that we need to always be aware of how the different influences may be. And I think, coming back to the prior question, what is coming out this year, where, of course, it's not all rosy; you know, there are concerns, and we have to keep in mind those concerns with respect to support for research and being able to bring new therapies to bear, as well as reimbursement and those challenges. Community oncology often have practices that are small, 2 or 3 clinicians, and being able to deliver the multiple levels of care, invest in the technology, and carry the cost of the therapies and their delivery are areas where those reimbursement challenges, to a degree, each year thinking about how it is going to be taken care of is a burden that sits on the practices that we, as the work that we do at Navista, as well as supporting groups such as COA, are focused on to help the community oncology practices.