Dr Kittai Highlights the Patient Perspective for CLL

Adam Kittai, MD, Assistant Professor, The Ohio State University, discusses the perspective of patients with CLL treated with ibrutinib.

Transcript

Hi, I'm Adam Kittai. I'm the assistant professor at The Ohio State University.

Have you seen any issues pertaining to patients getting treatment or diagnoses in CLL?

I'm lucky enough to work at an academic center where we have a lot of medication assistance programs and a lot of partnerships with pharmaceutical companies to be able to get our patients various grants and to get drugs at cost for them.

I am fortunate to not run into too many of those issues, but I do see patients who are unable to afford these medications seeing local providers.

One of the things that I do to alleviate that problem personally is sometimes I share those patients. For patients that have to drive to see me 3 hours or more, or even less if it's impactful on the patient, oftentimes I'll be the prescriber of the medication and only have the patient see me at some length of interval—whether it be 6 months or a year, and have them see a local provider in-between. That way they're getting the labs and clinical checks that they need.

That's one thing that I do personally to help our patients out. But certainly, it is still a problem in the community.

There are various grant programs through pharmaceutical companies that I know are available to make these drugs more affordable to our patients.

As more data accumulates showing the superiority of these drugs in chemoimmunotherapy, which I believe to be already definitive but more data's always nice, it should persuade the insurance companies to fund coverage for these medications moving forward into the future.

How accessible is this treatment and is there anything being done to improve that?

Ibrutinib's pretty accessible. It's currently FDA approved and it is listed on the NCCN drugs as a treatment that has an option for treatment-naive and relapsed/refractory (R/R) patients.

I think it is accessible. I'm not sure if there's anything specific that people are doing to make it more accessible, but it is 1 of the most commonly used drugs for treatment-naive and relapsed/refractory CLL at this time.