CAR-T Meeting 2024 | Improving access to advanced therapies: the access to CAR-T in Europe

My presentation was about the need to improve infrastructure and human resources to cope with the growing activity in the field of advanced therapies, mostly CAR T-cells at the moment, but others are coming, not only in hematology and oncology, but other disciplines.

So, we need more people, we need better training of people, and how do we get organized to ensure that appropriate training is provided? That was the topic I covered.

To be frank, I’m not sure we’ve made that much progress. I think, you know, most centers, most hospitals that were able to deliver allogeneic transplantation are now in capacity to give access to CAR T-cells, and probably a few additional hospitals which where at least doing autologous transplants are now in capacity to provide access to CAR T-cells. But we lack robust data on the fraction of patients who could benefit from CAR T-cells treatment and who do actually receive the treatment. So we need better epidemiological data to further understand. This is a global problem and I insisted yesterday during my presentation, that we must address this problem globally with healthcare authorities. How many hospitals do we need in countries like Germany, France, Italy, Spain, and others to cover the needs of the population? And how do we take advantage of the existing alternatives, such as other forms of immunotherapies that target CD19 or BCMA, to provide the best chances to candidate patients?

So there is still a lot to do. Let’s see the positive aspects: most European countries, at least in Western Europe -there is still a lot of work to be done in Eastern Europe, I guess- but at least in Western Europe, most European countries can give access to CAR T-cell treatments.