Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation: ASBMT/CIBMTR 2010 tandem meeting highlights and discussion

Abstract

The American Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (ASBMT) and the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplantation Research (CIBMTR) held their 12th Annual Tandem Meeting this Febru- ary in Orlando, Florida. This International Transplant Meeting brought together a record 2,570 attendees from 45 countries, and included the state of the art educational and plenary sessions and 478 oral and poster presentations. Recently, the American Journal of Hematology published a series of articles reviewing the ‘‘Top 10 clinically oriented abstracts’’ pre- sented at the 2009 American Society of Hematology meeting [1]. Given how well this series was received, we believed it would be worthwhile providing a similar review of relevant abstracts from this year’s BMT meetings. There has been dramatic progress in this field that we believe is of great interest and importance to the hematology/oncology commun- ity. There was an incredible body of work presented and it is misleading to suggest that there is a ‘‘top 10’’ list. Many more abstracts than can be presented here are worthy of discussion and recognition and any exclu- sion of important studies is solely a reflection of space limitation rather than quality of work. We tried to pick abstracts that were important, novel, biologically interesting, and that address either changing or con- troversial areas in the field. All 10 abstracts are published in full in the February 2010 issue of Biology of Blood and Marrow Transplantation (volume 16, No. 2) and are identified here by their abstract number. Frequency