CARAT at EBMT in Lisbon

During the 44^th Annual Meeting of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) in Lisbon, Portugal, CARAT was very active in further promoting CAR T cells for cellular therapy.

A central event was the very successful joint EBMT-CARAT session on March 19, 2018 chaired by Christian Chabannon (Aix-Marseille University School of Medicine, Secretary of the EBMT Cell Therapy & Immunobiology Working Party) and David Gancberg (European Commission) with three very interesting talks by leading scientists in the field:

• Attilio Bondanza: Quality vs. Quantity: what's more important in CAR T-cells
• Andrew Kaiser: CARAT: Enabling technologies for CAR therapies
• Gianpietro Dotti: Balancing safety and efficiency of CAR T-cells

The talks were followed by fruitful discussions among the 400 participants in the session. We are happy to say that it was the best attended session at the Cell Therapy Day this year.

Additionally, CARAT sponsored this year’s EBMT Basic Science Award for Physicians, aiming to increase the level of basic science at the meeting. The prize was awarded to a group of excellent scientists: Silvia Preciado, Sandra Muntión, Ana Rico, Luis Antonio Corchete, Ana Gómez de la Torre, Teresa L Ramos, Concepción Rodríguez, Rebeca Ortega, Jorge Diego Martin-Rufino, Miriam López-Parra, Alba Redondo, Lika Osugui, Fermín Sánchez-Guijo. Fermín Sánchez-Guijo from Spain accepted the prize during the Opening Session and presented the prize-winning abstract on “The incorporation of extracellular vesicles from mesenchymal stromal cells into hematopoetic progenitors increase their clonogenic capacity and their engraftment ability” to an audience of approx. 850 participants.

Furthermore, results from the CARAT project were presented during a poster session with a poster on “Automated manufacturing of gene-engineered T cells under serum-free conditions” by CARAT’s coordinator Miltenyi Biotec B.V. & Co. KG.

To further promote the CARAT project and enable further networking in the CAR T cell therapy field, the coordinator Miltenyi represented the project at their booth, providing useful information in the CARAT brochures and handing out small CARAT giveaways to raise awareness of the project.

The slides of Andrew Kaiser’s presentation “CARAT: Enabling technologies for CAR therapies” are available here.