American Society of Hematology Conference

NMDP Research to be Presented

The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) will be giving five oral research presentations at this year's American Society of Hematology (ASH) meeting in Orlando, Fla., December 8-11. The ASH symposium is the world's largest gathering of hematologists from around the world, with more than 15,000 attending.

"ASH receives thousands of abstracts each year with only a small number selected for oral presentations. The selection of NMDP's abstracts for oral presentation validates the high quality of investigation and research activity," says Dennis Confer, NMDP chief medical officer. Three additional abstracts were accepted for poster presentations, two of which were for studies conducted jointly with the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry.

"The NMDP is the major source of unrelated donor data in the world. We have a Network of more than 400 hospitals and blood centers around the world that submit outcome data on donations and transplants. These eight studies involved thousands of patients and donors and nearly all of our Network centers," Confer explained.

"The studies aim to improve the results of unrelated donor transplants and to ease and improve the safety of unrelated blood stem cell donation," Confer added.