Adults With Rare Blood Cancers Can Now Receive Treatment From Home

A new medication for certain rare blood cancers has now become available through a limited distribution with AllianceRx Walgreens Prime.

Decitabine and cedazuridine (Inqovi, Taiho Oncology) treats adult patients with chronic myelomonocytic leukemia (CMML) and a type of blood cancer called myelodysplastic syndromes (MDS). Before the approval of this treatment, patients with either MDS or CMML would need to receive intravenous therapy at a health care facility. However, this new medication will allow patients to receive their treatment at home.

AllianceRx Walgreens Prime is a specialty and home delivery pharmacy that provides limited distribution drugs (LDDs) for certain rare, chronic, and complex conditions.

Currently, there are several LDDs that AllianceRx Walgreens Prime has announced are available:

• Monomethyl fumarate (Bafiertam, Banner Life Sciences) and ozanimod (Zeposia, Bristol Myers Squibb) are used to treat adult patients with relapsing multiple sclerosis, including clinically isolated syndrome, relapsing-remitting disease, and active secondary progressive disease.
• Pertuzumab, trastuzumab, and hyaluronidase-zzxf (Phesgo, Genentech) is a fixed-dose under the skin injection that combines medicines, such as pertuzumab and trastuzumab, with a family of enzymes called hyaluronidase. The medication treats adult patients with human epidermal growth factor receptor 2 (HER2)-positive metastatic breast cancer and early HER2-positive breast cancer. It is also used as a component within a treatment regimen that includes chemotherapy.
• Selpercatinib (Retevmo, Eli Lilly) is the first approved therapy for patients with advanced or metastatic rearranged during transfection (RET)-driven lung and thyroid cancers. The therapy is for patients whose tumors are advanced, metastatic, or have an alteration, such as mutation or fusion, in the RET gene, and it is able to treat non-small cell lung cancer, medullary thyroid cancer, and other types of thyroid cancers.

REFERENCE

Inqovi available for blood cancer patients to receive at home through AllianceRx Walgreens Prime. Orlando, FL: AllianceRx Walgreens Prime; August 27, 2020. alliancerxwp.com/contents/press-releases/inqovi-available-for-blood-cance.html. Accessed August 28, 2020.