Dana-Farber researchers and faculty made an impressive showing at this year’s ASTCT Meeting

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute shared on their LinkedIn: .

“Dana-Farber researchers and faculty made an impressive showing at this year’s American Society for Transplantation and Cellular Therapy (ASTCT) Meeting – as leaders, award recipients, scientific presenters, panelists, and panel moderators.

The meeting, held earlier this year in San Antonio, drew researchers, clinicians, and health care professionals from around the world to share research findings and insights from their own experience in stem cell transplantation and cellular therapy.

The ASTCT is a professional association created to improve the application and success of hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and related cellular therapies. Its 3,900 members work as researchers, clinical practitioners, and educators in more than 50 countries.

Highlights of this year’s meeting include:

Corey Cutler, Director of Dana-Farber’s Adult Stem Cell Transplant Program, was named the 2024-25 president of ASTCT. Prior to joining the ASTCT Board of Directors, he served the Society as Chair of the Task Force on Generic Drugs in Stem Cell Transplantation and Chair of the Committee on Young Clinicians and Investigators.

Nicoletta Cieri was awarded an Amy Strelzer Manasevit Research Program grant from the National Marrow Donor Program. The award, one of the largest and most coveted grants in the transplant and cellular therapy field, is given to early-career researchers investigating preventions or treatments to life-threatening complications following cellular therapy.

Robert J. Soiffer, Chief of the Division of Hematologic Malignancies, delivered the Mortimer M. Bortin Lecture, named for the founding scientific director of the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry.

Catherine Wu, Chief of the Division of Stem Cell Transplantation and Cellular Therapies, chaired a session on the topic of Antigen Discovery, during which she delivered a plenary presentation on a recent study she led with Cieri and Gad Getz of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard.

Amy Emmert, Executive Director of External Affairs, Cellular Therapies, moderated a panel discussion titled ‘The Space Between Value and Delivery in Cell Therapies – Sustainability, Evaluation, and Allocation.’

Mahasweta Gooptu gave a talk on factors to consider in stem cell transplants involving donors and recipients who are not a close immunological match. Traditionally, when a donor’s HLA markers are not a close match to the patient’s, survival rates have been significantly lower.

Because HLA matches are more common among members of the same ethnic group, and because some ethnicities are not well represented in donor registries, it can be difficult to find potential donors for patients from those groups.

However, recent advances such as the use of the drug cyclophosphamide to prevent GVHD have resulted in similar outcomes between fully matched and slightly mismatched donors.

Source: Dana-Farber Cancer Institute/LinkedIn

Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, located in Boston, Massachusetts, is a leading institution for cancer treatment and research. It was founded by Sidney Farber on 1947. Currently, the Institute has over 5,000 staff, faculty, and clinicians on board. They manage in excess of 640,000 outpatient visits each year, oversee more than 1,000 hospital discharges annually, and are actively involved in over 1,100 ongoing clinical trials.

As of 2023, Dana-Farber is ranked as the #4 cancer hospital globally. Dana-Farber’s research contributions include the development of Gleevec, a highly successful treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia.