Dear BSBMTCT member,

We want to take this opportunity to wish you all a very Merry Christmas and a Happy Healthy New Year. At the end of yet another challenging year, we hope that you manage to get some time off with family and loved ones, and we look forward to catching up in 2022.

Bring in the new!

Nominations and voting to appoint the three new members of our Executive Committee has now been completed and we are delighted to announce:

• • Eleni Tholouli, as Chair of Workforce Sub-Committee
  • Victoria Potter, as Chair of Indications Sub-Committee
  • Andrew Clark, as Chair of Guidelines Sub-Committee
• We are also delighted to announce that Fiona Dignan has been voted to stay as BSBMTCT Secretary and Deborah Richardson as BSBMTCT Treasurer. All roles will commence on the 1^st January 2022.
• We also thank outgoing executive members, Kavita Raj, Rachael Hough and Steve Robinson.

 COVID-19 – setbacks but new hopes and guidelines…

We don’t need to remind you that COVID-19 and all of its complexities continue to present challenges, not the least, the emergence of the Omicron variant. Yet there are some hopes in the immediate horizon, including access to anti-COVID treatments via local NHS COVID Medicines Delivery Units (CMDUs) and their associated policies. As of today, we have updated our ‘general’ BSBMTCT recommendations for the management of adult patients and allogeneic donors during the COVID-19 outbreak (led by Ram Malladi, who has taken over from Kim Orchard), which accompany the recently updated BSBMTCT COVID-19 Vaccination Statement from the Vaccination sub-committee (updated 30^th November). Accessible via the COVID-19 section of our website https://bsbmtct.org/bsbmtct-and-covid/

The randomised OCTAVE DUO trial has been given an extension to recruit into the Spring for up to 80 HSCT and 80 CAR-T patients We are grateful for support from all participating centres and hopefully we’ll get some good data to support the best vaccination strategy in our clinically vulnerable patients.

EBMT registry updates

You may be aware that EBMT discontinued the Macro registry development. As the current ProMISe system does not hold all items relevant for cellular therapy, EBMT is now testing functionality of a system called CASTOR to assist with data capture for the cellular therapy data as an interim, hybrid solution in the ongoing EBMT Registry upgrade project. EBMT plans that by 2023 a solid solution will be in place for data capture of both HSCT and cellular therapy data. Obviously any updates directly affect BSBMTCT registry operations and we’re working closely with EBMT. For more information see:

• https://www.ebmt.org/registry/cellular-therapy-data-collection-castor
• https://www.ebmt.org/ebmt/news/building-ebmt-interim-cellular-therapy-database

Once again our very best wishes for the Holiday season… stay positive, kind & strong – see you in’22!

John Snowden, Kim Orchard, Fiona Dignan, Deborah Richardson, Eduardo Olavarria, & Julia Lee