A huge amount of work goes into the EBMT scientific program each year, with many experts volunteering their time to ensure the program gives delegates the best experience possible. These efforts are led this year by Scientific Chair Anna Sureda.
This 2021 EBMT congress is last year that Anna will be the Scientific Program Chair. Here, she gives us some background on her own career and some detail on the work that has gone into EBMT 2021.
Q: Hello Anna and welcome to EBMT 2021. Sadly, it is another year in which we are meeting online, but the development of COVID-19 vaccines mean there are high hopes of a return to some kind of normal life in the next few months. How have things been at work for you, at the Clinical Haematology Department at the Institut Català d’Oncologia in Barcelona, Spain?
A: Hi everybody, this last year has been a difficult year not only in my institution but in the rest of the Spanish institutions. Since the COVID-19 pandemic arrived, now more than one year ago, our professional life has been completed reorganised and change in order to achieve several goals: protect our patients as much as possible and, in some way, allow them to receive the same medical care that they would have received in a non-COVID-19 environment, which has been quite complicated.
We have had to quickly learn without much evidence how to manage and to treat our transplanted patients who are COVID-19 positive. Finally, we healthcare professionals have had to protect ourselves not only as individuals but also with the objective to not to allow the health care system crash because of the lack of personnel. Relationships amongst professionals have also dramatically changed; no face-to-face meetings for the last year - not even small ones - but everything through virtual platforms that give you quite a lot of flexibility but do not allow to maintain the close personal contact which I think is a key aspect in our daily work.
Q: You have been involved in many different positions at EBMT, including the Lymphoma Working Party and as the organisation’s secretary. Has the role as Scientific Chair been the most challenging and rewarding? Give us an idea of how much work and how many meetings are involved in getting everything ready?
A: Each one of these positions is quite different and each one of them has its one rewards and satisfaction. While the chairpersonship of a Working Party, the Lymphoma Working Party in this case and the secretary positions represent more work and challenges being done inside the core of the society, all the achievements as Scientific Chair of the Annual Meeting are devoted to showing the transplant community interested in EBMT the scientific achievements in the transplant field.
We try to present, in a fair and balanced way, which are the hottest topics: the cutting edge of stem cell transplantation basic, translational and clinical science. If we are able to achieve this goal and, at the end of the meeting, participants share the same feelings, the meeting will have been a success. This is the major reward I can receive as a Scientific Chair of the Annual Meeting.
Q: What are some of the highlights of this year’s program for you, and will you have the opportunity to watch many of the sessions?
A: I will try to attend as many sessions as possible; the virtual way of doing things gives us more flexibility in some ways. We are losing the direct contact with the speakers and for sure more lively face-to-face discussions but, on the other hand, we have quite a lot of on demand sessions that can be seen during the whole meeting. In addition, sessions will be kept available for several weeks after the meeting. We did not have these advantages before.
From my point of view, clinical results, management of short but also long-term toxicity and translational science related to new strategies in cellular cell therapy continue to be of interest. Advances in the understanding and new ways of managing graft versus host disease and opportunistic infections in transplanted patients as well as specific sessions devoted to lymphoproliferative disorders are also of interest to me.
Q: COVID-19 has obviously affected the lives of all our delegates. How do you decide how much COVID-19 content it is appropriate to have in the congress? What are some of the COVID-related highlights?
A: COVID-19 related sessions represent one of the hot topics of our meeting. We have included several of them in this year’s program too. However, the orientation has been a little bit different. We have had one year to learn; to learn how the hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and cellular therapy programs have adapted themselves to the “new routine” and we will have several presentations on that, coming from European countries and coming from experiences outside Europe.
We also have more solid information how cellular therapy strategies can contribute in the management and control of COVID-19 infection; this information was not there last year and this is why we have included a session on that. COVID-19 vaccination in our transplant patients and CAR T-cell recipients will also have a specific spot. In summary, COVID-19 sessions will occupy a significant portion of our scientific programme without, of course, obscuring the rest of the scientific advances we have had in the field of cellular therapy.
Q: What are some of the topics that are new to this year’s programme?
A: Once more, CAR T-cell related topics represent a high percentage of the science we will be showing in this annual edition with the more solid knowledge gained after one year of additional experience. Patient reported outcomes also represent not really a new but an area of increasing interest in the field of stem cell transplant and cellular therapy and we’ll have a session dedicated to the topic. Not new - but also very interesting because we need to refine our approaches - are the topics of better donor selection and risk stratification of patients before transplant. Finally, joint sessions with sister societies always have a new flavour and allow EBMT to share information, knowledge and experiences with stem cell transplantation programs around the world. We need to be more global in this sense.
Q: How hopeful are you that we can meet again in person at the 2022 Prague EBMT Congress?
A: I really hope vaccines do a great job and we are able to meet in person in Prague next year. It is always difficult to guess but, vaccination programs are more or less in place in the different European countries and the different governments are thinking of having a significant proportion of the population vaccinated before or I would say, more realistically, after summer time. We still have a long way to go until March 2022. There are always uncertainties in these predictions because we really do not know the impact that these new strains that are rapidly spreading in Europe will have but, I think there is a clear hope that we can have a face to face meeting next year.
Thank you Anna, and enjoy EBMT 2021!
