Health Care Resource Utilization, Costs, and Treatment Patterns Among Patients With Extensive-Stage SCLC Treated in the Community Oncology Setting

Jerome Goldschmidt, MD, Blue Ridge Cancer Care, Blacksburg, VA, discusses findings from a study on the real-world burden of myelosuppression among patients with extensive stage small cell lung cancer treated in the community oncology setting.

This study was presented at the 2021 ASH Annual Meeting.

Transcript
Hi, my name is Jerome H. Goldschmidt, Jr. I am a medical oncologist at Blue Ridge Cancer Care in Blacksburg, Virginia. And I have the pleasure today to talk about the real-world burden of myelosuppression among patients with extensive stage small cell lung cancer treated in the community oncology setting. This is a study that was done in concert with Ontada, which is part of McKesson. What the study really looked at was the 5 years of data of small cell lung cancer patients in The US Oncology Network, in our electronic medical record. We were able to take around 1400 patients from the electronic medical record and really break them down into whether they had had greater than or equal to 3 hematologic adverse events or not.

What we found was that about two-thirds of those patients did have at least neutropenia, significant anemia, or significant grade 3 or more thrombocytopenia. And what that really translated into was, when we looked further at the outpatient setting, we were able to see that these patients received more growth factors, had more transfusions, had potentially more hospitalizations and more time in the clinic, as well had required more health care utilization. What this translates into from a financial standpoint is about an $8000 to $9000 difference. So if you are a small cell lung cancer patient receiving myelosuppressive chemotherapy with or without atezolizumab, you are going to have not only more burdens as far as clinical metrics, but also it's going to be a financial toxicity as well. Really, what this is setting the stage for is are there any therapeutics or is there any pharmacologic treatment that could help with that?

Certainly, we do have growth factors, but they only treat one line of therapy, and obviously, G1 Therapeutics is a company that makes one drug called trilaciclib, and this is given right now only in the small cell lung cancer setting in the extensive stage to prevent myelosuppression, not just of one, but of multiple lineages. And so that's really setting the stage for ongoing studies and manuscripts to really show the effects of trilaciclib hopefully reversing this burden on patients. So look for it in colon cancer, as well as breast cancer and possibly bladder cancer in the future. I know this is a little unusual for physicians who are looking at ASH abstracts, but it did involve hematologic burdens. So we feel it was very noteworthy to have it there, and appreciate the opportunity to talk about it today.