Krish Patel, MD, Sarah Cannon Research Institute, Nashville, Tennessee, presented a quality improvement initiative examining barriers to implementing bispecific antibody therapy for relapsed/refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma in community oncology settings at the 2025 American Society of Hematology (ASH) Annual Meeting & Exposition in Orlando, Florida.

The study identified key challenges, which included knowledge gaps in toxicity management, staffing, and monitoring logistics, and used these insights to develop an educational toolkit to support safe administration within community oncology practices.

Dr Patel concluded, “We developed a toolkit to hopefully empower more practices to be able to use these therapies safely in relapsed/refractory DLBCL where they have the potential to really impact outcomes in patient populations that are not able to travel and receive these therapies elsewhere.”

Transcript:

Hi, I'm Krish Patel. I'm the director of lymphoma research at the Sarah Cannon Research Institute in Nashville, Tennessee. It's my pleasure to coming to you from the ASH meeting in Orlando this year. I'm going to talk about an abstract that we're presenting this evening, looking at factors related to delivery of bispecific antibodies for relapsed/refractory diffuse large B-cell lymphoma.

Just to set the stage, bispecific antibodies have been approved for treatment of third line and later diffuse large B-cell lymphoma since around 2023. We recognize these are a new treatment modality with some unique toxicities, including cytokine release syndrome and potentially neurologic toxicities. One of the things that we recognize is not everybody in community oncology has had an opportunity to use these agents.

We embarked on a quality improvement effort to really understand first and foremost, what are some of the factors related to use of these agents or not use in community practices around the country today? Then in a serial manner, really trying to drill down and create or think about how do we create toolkits that empower community oncology sites who are not delivering these therapies today to potentially be able to do that. What we did was over a year, we met several different times with practices around the country, surveyed them on their barriers and challenges to implementing bispecific therapy.

What we identified is it's really a number of things. It can be knowledge gaps around how to identify adverse events, knowledge gaps around how to manage those adverse events, the need to designate and train specific staff, and then really to think about things like how do we implement the schedule of monitoring that we might need to safely administer these agents. Then in a serial fashion, we talked about what are some of the educational tools that would really help to close that gap.

Ultimately our work helps to identify some of the areas that practices that are thinking about implementing these therapies can practically identify and address. We developed a toolkit to hopefully empower more practices to be able to use these therapies safely in relapsed/refractory DLBCL where they have the potential to really impact outcomes in patient populations that are not able to travel and receive these therapies elsewhere.

Source:

Patel K, Brody J, Nawaz SM, et al. Optimizing processes for adverse event management for bispecific antibodies for diffuse large b-cell lymphoma in community practice: Insights from a quality improvement initiative. Dec 6-9, 2025; Orlando, FL. Abstract: 6183