Letter from the Editor

Dear colleagues,

It is a great pleasure to introduce this peer-reviewed EHA2023 Medicom Conference Report. The EHA annual meeting held in Frankfurt this year
was a great event everyone looked forward to. The Scientific Program Committee of the EHA has taken care of what, in my opinion, turned out to be a wonderful programme. The conference was again organised as a hybrid meeting, a format that currently is available for most medical conferences, and offered the opportunity to gather knowledge in benign as well as malignant haematology. Basic and translational research, but also a special focus on clinical topics were presented in many parallel sessions. From this year’s EHA Medicom Conference Report, we selected several abstracts that will most likely change your daily practice now or soon. The abstracts are summarised in a way that the information is easy to digest in a rather short time. Highlights of the conference and report include the striking rapidly evolving field of immunotherapy including bispecific antibody and CAR T-cell treatment applied in a variety ofhaematological malignancies. Also, the ongoing further deciphering of the molecular basis of benign and malignant disease by all kinds of new technologies paving the way for new treatment options is covered in this report. Read about the treatment of AML, a disease in which no new developments emerged for a long time, which is rapidly changing with the development of neweffective targeted treatments and successful maintenance treatment. Especially in patients unfit for intensive chemotherapy,new avenues are opened. Finally, the report also covers other malignant and non-malignant haematological diseases, for whichnew drugs are rapidly developed and approved by the regulatory authorities.

You will find snapshots of all these new developments in this report. I hope that these are helpful in your daily practice and am certain that you will enjoy reading 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 2 August 20232 August 2023