Krish Patel, MD, Sarah Cannon Research Institute, Nashville, Tennessee, presented a patient preference study in relapsed/refractory (R/R) follicular lymphoma (FL) exploring how patients value different treatment delivery characteristics amid an expanding therapeutic landscape at the 2025 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition in Orlando, Florida.

The study found strong preferences for less frequent dosing, fixed-duration therapy, and treatments that can be delivered close to home with minimal prolonged monitoring after surveying 125 previously treated patients.

Dr Patel concluded, “we recognize that those treatments have different characteristics and therapies that patients can receive safely, close to home, less frequently, and in a fixed duration appear to be their preference.”

Transcript:

Hi, I'm Krish Patel. I'm the Director of Lymphoma Research at Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, Tennessee. It's my pleasure to be here with you at the ASH 2025 meeting in Orlando. I'm going to talk to you about an abstract that we're presenting in a poster that I think is a really important patient preference work that we did.

We recognize in relapsed/refractory follicular lymphoma in the last few years there have been many, many different therapies approved in the third line setting and beyond. These are treatments that span the gamut from oral therapies to infusions to subcutaneous injections to even cellular therapy. 

One can imagine that it can be very difficult to think about how to select those therapies for our patients. We don't have comparative data for these different therapies, so we can't necessarily say that we know one is better than the other. We really wanted to understand what patient preferences are when thinking about the actual characteristics of how the therapy is delivered and where it is delivered, how frequently, things of that nature.

What we did was we surveyed 125 patients with follicular lymphoma that had previously undergone therapy, patients who might need to have subsequent therapies and really tried to understand if we presented them different clinical treatment options and summarized in plain language the different characteristics, how the medicine's given, how frequently, where they would receive the medicine, how long for, and what kinds of outcomes they might expect, what kinds of adverse events are associated with those therapies, what would be their preferences? We used a best worst scale to help us answer those preferences. These scenarios were presented to patients in serial.

I'll summarize some of the key findings from our work where we recognize that for patients, first and foremost, that less frequent dosing of a therapy, meaning not necessarily something that they have to take all the time or come in for every week, but longer intervals was important. A fixed duration of therapy. 

If they could define, when do I start, when do I end, rather than say treatment until they progress, which might be a prolonged period of treatment time, were amongst the most important factors to them. They also highlighted for us that there are patient factors that are treatment related characteristics that are very challenging. Therapies that had to be delivered distant from their homes were less preferable or identified as more burdensome and ultimately having to be monitored in a unique way. Prolonged monitoring after therapy was also felt to be a burden.

When we think about the treatments that we have in follicular lymphoma, oral therapies with infusion, bispecific antibody therapy, cellular therapy, we recognize that those treatments have different characteristics and therapies that patients can receive safely, close to home, less frequently, and in a fixed duration appear to be their preference.

Source:

Patel K, Ma E, Wu M, et al. Diverse preferences for treatment options in relapsed/refractory (R/R) follicular lymphoma (FL): Survey results from patients in the United States (US). Dec 6-9, 2025; Orlando, FL. Abstract: 6180