SOHO 2024 | Access to therapy for indolent lymphomas in Latin America

So we had a very interesting session or several interesting sessions where we talked about access to therapy in several parts of the world outside the United States. And I talked about indolent lymphomas, more specifically follicular lymphomas. So although we do have access to some therapies, we don’t have access to all therapies. And in a country like Brazil, you have a public sector and you have a private sector, and availability and access to therapies can vary widely depending on where you’re practising medicine and where the patient is seen. So I was able to bring a very interesting, I think, perspective to the audience based on all the conversations and the talks and the discussions that are generated during the regular sessions and say, look, you know, this is what was presented, but this is what we can do locally in this part of the world. And I focused in Brazil and Latin America. So I think it was very enlightening and I started my talk saying that it was a reality check because oftentimes you hear about a lot of things but they’re not available when you go back home. You know, eventually they do become available but immediately they’re not available and sometimes some things never become available. That’s becoming less common but it happens on the occasion. So I think it was important to alert people in the audience which has a very global representation here at SOHO to learn about some of these regional differences. So some of the regional differences has to do with therapies, drugs that are approved in the United States, and in Brazil it used to take years before they were approved in Brazil. That time has shortened. We have had a lesser time between approval for the FDA or EMA and our regulatory agency in Brazil. But there’s still a lag. Some of the more expensive therapies, they take longer. So we just had CAR-T approved in our country in the last one or two years, although they’ve been available in Europe and the United States for the last five, seven years routinely. So there are different treatment modalities that can take a little bit longer for us to get full approval in our countries. And then there’s the issue of payers getting access and prescribing these things, which can also vary between regions.