Dear BSBMTCT member,

We hope all remains well with you and your teams and you have had good  summer breaks.

Otherwise, as always, there remains much happening…

• The vaccination story moves on, with progress on third vaccines, though COVID remains an issue, even with our the fully vaccinated patients and staff. The national multi-speciality OCTAVE Study of immune response post-COVID vaccination is recruiting until the first week in October within the core and other IMPACT centres, with now over 180 patients recruited to deep immunophenotyping and serology arms. Analysis of the full OCTAVE cohort (with the HSCT cohort amongst several thousand patients across clinically extremely vulnerable groups) will proceed shortly. Many thanks to all centres involved. The HSCT arm for the follow on OCTAVE DUO Study compares responses in low and non-responders to Pfizer and Moderna booster vaccines. The HSCT arm is in the second wave of the study and has so far recruited 17 patients. Our BSBMTCT COVID-19 guidelines and vaccination guidelines continue to provide guidance: https://bsbmtct.org/bsbmtct-and-covid/ and will be updated in October.
• We continue to develop workforce, revised BMT indications, modernising internal workings of the society and strengthening links with our key partners in ongoing projects.
• We are planning to recruit new members to our Executive Committee via elections soon to deliver specific and essential roles in our Society. We will be advertising for three new roles in the coming weeks, these include Chairs for the following sub-committees; Guidelines, Workforce and Indications.

Our very best wishes – we hope to see many of you soon now that face-to-face meetings are becoming more common.

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