Dear friends and colleagues,
The summer holidays are fast approaching and most of us are getting ready or have already begun our well-deserved relaxing holidays with families or friends.
Looking back to the rapidly passing first half of 2019, I would like to summarize some of the major achievements of our society.
After the most ever successful Annual Meeting in Frankfurt with over 5600 attendees and more than 1000 scientific presentations, EBMT has already started to prepare the 2020 Annual Meeting which will be taking place in Madrid.
EBMT is extremely proud after the European Medical Agency (EMA) has released their qualification opinion on the cellular therapy module of our registry early this year. Thus, please continue to register your commercial and academic CAR T cell therapies into the EBMT registry by using the Cell Therapy data collection forms. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions regarding your CAR T cell registration.
As an open mind society, EBMT wants to develop and share outcome data from CAR T Cell therapies and after several meetings with all stakeholders, we have developed a governance structure of the CAR T Cell community, with more details to follow in this newsletter.
A more closer collaboration with HARMONY an EU funded project has been initiatiated aiming to increase access and care for patients with hematologic malignancies with the use of big data.
We are also building a strong working relationship with EHA in CAR T cell therapies by arranging a jointly organized and extremely successful 1st European CAR T Cell Meeting in February in Paris. The 2nd European CAR T Cell Meeting – again jointly organized by EBMT and EHA - is already planned for January 30 – February 1, 2020 in Sitges, Barcelona (Spain).
The prospective RACE trial for aplastic anemia has reached his objective of 200 randomized patients and first results will be expected later this year.
Excellent feedback have been received from attendees of the “Sickle Cell Meeting“ in Regensburg and the mide size event “1st EBMT GvHD Summit“ in Warsaw.
The Benchmark project of the EBMT Clinical Outcomes Group which will allow EBMT centers to compare their transplant results to the general community and will increase center’s quality management system has been finalized and is waiting for the implementaton of the new MACRO registry system.
I want to apologise for the delayed implementation of our new Registry system. This continues to progress but the complexity of data migration from ProMISe to MACRO has been underestimated and still needs some time in order to ensure historical data is presented accurately. This is essential for the continued operation of the Registry. The EBMT Registry project group and the vendor Elsevier are working hard to solve these problems as quickly as possible. MACRO Data Entry Training will continue after the summer holidays as planned. All data including cellular therapy and CAR T cell treatments can still be registered in ProMISe for later transfer into MACRO.
Lastly, please do not miss the 4th International Transplant Course (ITC) which will be held in Barcelona right after the summer holidays from September 6th to 8th 2019 as this is an ideal meeting for newcomers in the field of stem cell transplantation and cellular therapies or for those who would like to update their knowledge according to the current advances.
Now, please enjoy this issue of the EBMT Newsletter.
I wish everyone a happy and relaxing summer holiday.
Nicolaus Kröger
EBMT President