The Real-World Challenges of Cell and Gene Therapy in Oncology

Joe DePinto, MBA, head of cell, gene, and advanced therapies at McKesson Pharmaceutical Solutions and Services, discusses some of the key challenges to equitable access to cell and gene therapies, especially in underserved populations.

Cell and gene therapy is a rapidly advancing field with significant potential to revolutionize medicine. While scientific breakthroughs have exceeded expectations, DePinto explains that commercial success has lagged, leading to treatment area gaps, as not all patients have access to these therapies.

Here, DePinto discusses some of the challenges and disparities that present barriers to seeing the full potential of cell and gene therapy for patients with cancer.

Transcription:

0:09 | Cell and gene therapy is such an exciting space. The science has outperformed the benchmarks in every area that cell and gene therapy has explored. The commercial success has not caught up at this point, because it is still very much a nascent space, and much of the delivery of cell and gene therapy is done at academic centers and hospitals. By the fact that this is given in these academic centers and it is given in hospital settings, there tends to be some treatment area gaps.

0:52 | In October, we published the McKesson 2024 Cell and Gene Therapy Report, and we mapped out in the United States all of the sites that have given cell and gene therapies. Then we broke it out by cell and by gene therapies, and you can see there’s delivery of care deserts that exist, and most of the deliveries in the large metropolitan areas. There are a lot of total available patients that may have access to these products that have to travel greater than 50 miles, and that is a challenge for some socioeconomic areas to do that travel, and to be able to travel and stay for an extended period of time with a caregiver, and that reduces, obviously, the ability for those therapies to be given to that patient population.