Letter from the Editor

Dear colleagues,

It is with great pleasure that I introduce this peer-reviewed ASH 2023 Medicom Conference Report. The ASH conference was again organised as a hybrid meeting, a format that is currently commonly offered for most medical conferences.

The ASH Annual Meetings together with the EHA Annual Meetings are the conferences haematologists all over the world are especially interested in. It offers the opportunity to get informed about benign as well as malignant haematology.

At this year’s meeting, held in San Diego, basic, translational, and clinical topics were discussed in an overwhelming number of presentations. For this report, we selected a number of interesting abstracts that will most likely change your daily practice now or in the near future. The abstracts are summarised in a way that the information is easy to digest in a rather short time.

The deciphering of the molecular basis of benign and malignant disease by new technologies is striking. The rapidly evolving field of immunotherapy, including bispecific antibody and CAR T-cell treatment applied in a variety of haematological malignancies, again got a lot of attention at the ASH Annual Meeting. Minimal residual disease (MRD) is more and more used as a surrogate endpoint in various malignant diseases and helps to inform on the treatment choice. It is striking that in many malignant and non-malignant haematological diseases, new drugs are rapidly developed and approved by regulatory authorities. Also in patients unfit for intensive chemotherapy, new avenues are opened by these novel drugs. You will find snapshots of all these new developments in this report. I can imagine that these are helpful in your daily practice and I am certain that you will enjoy this report.

Best wishes,

Gert Ossenkoppele

Biography
Gert Ossenkoppele is a professor of Hematology at the Amsterdam UMC, location VUMC, since 2003. He obtained his doctorate of medicine at that same University in 1977. He is board certified in Hematology and Internal medicine since 1984. The title of his PhD thesis (1990) was: ”Differentiation induction in AML”. Gert Ossenkoppele has authored over 450 publications in peer-reviewed journals and is an invited speaker at many national and international scientific meetings. His research interests are mainly translational and include the (stem cell) biology of AML, leukaemic stem cell target discovery, immunotherapy and measurable residual disease (MRD) detection using flow cytometry to inform the treatment of AML. He is the principal investigator of many national and international clinical trials in myeloid malignancies and regularly functions as a reviewer for many high-impact haematological journals (Blood, Leukemia, Haematologica, JAMA Oncology, Lancet Oncology NEJM). He is a member and fulfils a mentorship of the AML working party of HOVON (Dutch-Belgian Hematology Trial Group) and former vice-chair of the HOVON Executive Board. He co-leads the AML WP of HARMONY, is a lead participant in the AML Work package of the European LeukemiaNet(ELN) and is a board member of the ELN foundation. Until recently, he was a board member of the EHA and is now vice-chair of the EHA Educational Committee. Subsequently to his former position as chair of the AML Scientific working group of EHA, he is now a member of this group. He is a member of the Global and EU steering committee of the AMLGlobalPortal an educational portal for hematologists (www.amlglobalportal.com). During his current retirement, he maintains an honorary position as a haematologist at the Amsterdam UMC.

Conflicts of Interest
Prof. Gert Ossenkoppele functions as a consultant for J&J, Daiichi-Sanyko, BMS-Celgene, Servier, and Roche. Lastly, he is a member of the advisory boards of Novartis, Pfizer, Abbvie, J&J, Daiichi-Sanyko, BMS-Celgene, AGIOS, Amgen, Astellas, Roche, and Jazz pharmaceuticals.



Posted on 7 February, 20247 February, 2024