Patient-reported outcomes after CAR T-cell therapy in patients with hematological malignancies

The remarkable improvement in survival among individuals with hematological malignancies receiving chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T-cell therapy has highlighted the growing unmet need to incorporate patient-centered assessments in management guidelines for these patients. That CAR T-cell therapy is associated with unique toxicities and relatively high symptom burden in the first few weeks after cell infusion is well known. Magnifying the patient's voice by using patient-reported outcomes (PROs) might support personalized intervention in the acute-care setting, optimize the use of medical resources, improve satisfaction with therapy, and enhance survival benefit. However, various factors impede PRO use in routine patient care: (1) the feasibility of PRO assessment during the acute phase of treatment, especially in patients experiencing neurological toxicities, is not well established; (2) although PROs are widely used in drug- development trials, the assessment tools used in clinical trials primarily inform quality-of-life or safety comparisons among study arms and are rarely the proper tools for assessing and capturing clinically meaningful adverse events that should be monitored in routine patient care; (3) PRO data that could guide how best to monitor and capture the delayed effects of CAR T-cell therapy in long-term survivors are limited. There is a pressing need to overcome these barriers to integrating evidence-based PROs into standard-of-care guidelines for patients receiving CAR T-cell therapy. In this review, we present the current state of PRO utilization in CAR T-cell therapy. We also discuss practical approaches and future directions for successful implementation of PROs in the care of patients receiving CAR T-cell therapy.