ASH 2025 | Remote therapeutic monitoring reduces infection-related hospitalizations in hematologic cancers

Hello, I’m Dr James Essell. I’m very excited to discuss today a recent abstract that we had in a world presentation at ASH titled, Remote Therapeutic Monitoring Reduces Hospitalization Due to Infection in Patients Being Treated for Hematologic Malignancy. The idea behind this was that patients with hematologic malignancies, even more so than solid tumors, have a higher risk of infection. And this can be a significant amount of morbidity, even mortality. So what we wanted to check was by using remote therapeutic monitoring, specifically the Canopy Care ePRO system, could we decrease this? And the idea here, we used a large practice in Arkansas, community practice. And we looked initially at 2,000 patients, broke that down into those on ePRO who were actively participating compared to those who were not enrolled. 

And the idea is that you’re a cancer patient all the time, 24/7, not just the 15 minutes every three weeks or every four weeks you’re in the oncology office. And by having this system, we could send a message to the patient’s smartphone once a week, asking them how they’re feeling to try and intervene quicker and also allow them to much easier to communicate to the office by sending a message that goes to the nurse’s portal. And then when the nurse receives the message, it’s sorted by severity so that they can get back in a timely fashion. The whole idea here is, could this approach having communication much easier and proactive communication, be better than the standard method now, which is calling a phone tree and trying to get a hold of a nurse or sending through a portal? 

So with that in mind, we went back retrospectively and looked at these patients, and we saw that, yes, 22% more patients ended up receiving oral antibiotics via the office, but 52% less hospitalizations for infection and 33% less emergency visits. So the story here is that by communicating a lot of these symptoms, which may not be a fever, but fatigue, pain that are preliminary symptoms that suggest infection, the patient’s seen quicker, intervened quicker, and it doesn’t bloom into a full pneumonia. For example, it can be treated while it’s still bronchitis. And when you’re dealing with cancer, it’s bad enough going through all the treatments, but no one wants to spend time in the hospital. And we had showed a significant reduction in hospitalization using this technique. 

We’re really excited now with this information. Our focus really over the last year has been with the rollout of bispecific T-cell engagers and down the road chimeric antigen receptor T-cell engagers, where we think this would really be a perfect approach. These patients have a lot of toxicity up front, specifically cytokine release syndrome and neurologic toxicity. And by setting this, and in this situation, depending on the practice, we can message the patient every four hours, every six hours, and intervene much quicker than waiting for the patient to reach out or much more efficiently than having a nurse call on the patient every six hours. Now the nurse only needs to call if they’re not getting a message from the patient. So we think this really will help, and we’re seeing this already in practices, allow community practice to use this new life-saving therapy. And then in the future, we’ll be doing the same thing with chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy or CAR-T therapy. Same thing. Allow this to be done as an outpatient with very close monitoring in an efficient and effective style.

This transcript is AI-generated. While we strive for accuracy, please verify this copy with the video.