From November 14th to 17th, 2024, the Cellular Therapy and Immunotherapy Conference (CTI) was grandly held in Hangzhou, China, gathering top experts, scholars, and industry leaders in the fields of cell therapy and immune therapy from around the world. The conference served not only as an international platform for academic exchange but also as an important window to showcase the latest scientific research and promote the development of the field. During the conference, "Hematology Frontier" specially invited Dr. Ibrahim Yakoub-Agha from the Lille University , France, to reveal the unlimited potential and broad prospects of cellular immunotherapy in myelofibrosis.

• Dr.Ibrahim Yakoub-Agha：Actually, I’m a professor of hematology, but I’m focusing on immunotherapy, especially cellular immunotherapy, such as allogeneic hematopoietic stem cell transplantation and CAR-T cells. My main objective from my research, it’s especially in the clinical data regarding toxicity, tolerance of cellular therapy, in general, and allogeneic transplantation and CAR-T cells.

• Actually, I think immunotherapy, in general, is something very important. Actually, we started thinking about immunotherapyand curing cancer 30 or 40 years ago. But we start seeing some new drugs or treatment or seller nowadays 30 or 40 years after this. Let me tell you this story. When I start my fellowship, you know, for every single fellowship, we needed to understand and know chemotherapy, mode of action, toxicity, et cetera. But nowadays, my students, they don’t need to learn about chemotherapy. Now, they need to learn about immunotherapy, tumor escape, et cetera. I think immunotherapy is something very important. Such as bispecific, for instance, or checkpoint inhibitors, we transformed the prognosis of the patient, for instance, melanoma. Now we can cure some metastatic melanoma, which was something very impossible a few years ago. With CAR-T cell therapy, this is a new era, new way to cure the patients.

• This meeting is very important for me at three levels. First of all, we can meet with colleagues and friends. This is a very good opportunity to share, to discuss how to decide for collaboration or something to do together. The second level, there are 24 hours a day. So we cannot be aware of every single progress or whatever in medicine. So coming here, we can on the spot, learn a lot from our colleagues and we can present we can do what we have to tell them. And the third thing is that each meeting like this one, and especially this one, is a very good meeting, a big meeting. It gives you some ideas how to go further in your research and even in your education. So if you need to set up such a meeting in your country, et cetera, so it’s very helpful.

• So I will handle the issue of allogeneic hematopoietic cell transplantation and myelofibrosis, primary or secondary myelofibrosis. Allogeneic transplantation is the only corrective treatment for those patients. However, we have some toxicity with this treatment. On the other hand, not everybody needs a transplantation because myelofibrosis, in general, it’s a chronic disease. We can live with it without symptoms, everything is okay. So we don’t need to treat their patients. I will focus on how to identify the patients who are candidates for transplantation. Then why identify the patient? What to do? We need to explore factors related to the patient and physical conditions. Factors related to the disease? Is there any risk of transformation into AML, for instance, or shorter survival for the patient? At the end, if we decide to transplant the patient, how and especially when—this is the most difficult question, when, but I think I have simple answers.

• Nowadays, we have many axes of development. It can be allogeneic CAR-T, for instance, or in vivo CAR-T, or combination, et cetera. But I think something is sure: we’re starting with CAR-T. And this is only the starting; we will see more and more with this technology in this treatment.