Editor’s Note:The 2025 China-Europe Scientific Forum on Blood and Marrow Transplantation and Cellular Therapy was recently held successfully in Guangzhou. The conference was co-hosted by the Hematology Branch of the China International Exchange and Promotive Association for Medical and Health Care (CPAM) and the Shanghai Representative Office of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation Foundation (EBMT, Netherlands). It was jointly organized by the National Clinical Research Center for Hematologic Diseases – Institute of Hematology, Peking University, Sun Yat-sen University Cancer Center, and the Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University.
The event brought together leading experts and scholars from China and Europe in the fields of hematopoietic cell transplantation and cellular therapy, facilitating in-depth discussions on academic frontiers and the sharing of cutting-edge research findings.
At the event, Oncology Oncology Frontier-Hematology Frontier conducted an exclusive interview with Professor Anna Sureda, current President of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) and expert at the Institut Català d’Oncologia, Barcelona. As one of the European co-chairs of the conference, Prof. Sureda shared her impressions of the meeting and offered forward-looking insights on topics such as the future of China-Europe collaboration in transplantation, the integration of emerging therapies like CAR-T, and strategies to enhance treatment accessibility in resource-limited settings.
Oncology Frontier-Hematology Frontier：As you visit China for the China-Europe Scientific Conference on Hematology and Stem Cell Transplantation, what are your impressions? What are your hopes for strengthening academic exchange and clinical collaboration between China and Europe in this field?
Professor Anna Sureda：So thank you very much, first of all, for the interview. So I arrived here three days ago and I visited first of all Foshan and now here in Guangzhou. I have to say that I am very positively impressed by the high level of the scientific and clinical research with the different Chinese physicians and the different Chinese groups.I think that the scientific forum that we are having today is the perfect place to exchange science, to try to improve collaboration in the future and to foster education and scientific processes within our young colleagues.So I’m really very much hoping that in the near future, in the next years, we are able to streamline this collaboration to make even this scientific forum more impactful and even to develop additional educational scientific activities over the year.
Oncology Frontier-Hematology Frontier：With ongoing advancements in transplant techniques—such as improved conditioning regimens, expanded donor options, and better management of complications—treatment outcomes have greatly improved. What do you consider the most groundbreaking progress so far, and how has it impacted patients?
Professor Anna Sureda：So I think that we are entering a kind of new era when we talk about cellular therapy. So for many years, autologous and allogeneic stem cell transplantation have been the two major types of cellular therapies. Nowadays we have additional immunotherapy treatments that are starting to be used. Basically, the introduction of autologous CAR-T cells, basically in patients with lymphomas, in patients with B-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia, and in patients with multiple myeloma. We have been able to improve the outcome of patients being treated with stem cell transplantation with all the advances that you have mentioned. And nowadays we are experimenting how we can include CAR-T cells in the treatment landscape of these patients to try to improve the long-term outcomes and in some cases, of course, reducing the number of patients being treated with stem cell transplantation.
Oncology Frontier-Hematology Frontier：Globally, there are still challenges in terms of access to and standardization of hematopoietic cell transplantation, especially in resource-limited regions. As President of the EBMT, could you share the main strategies EBMT is implementing to promote treatment standardization and international collaboration? What lessons from Europe do you think could be valuable for other regions?
Professor Anna Sureda：So the EBMT mission is to improve the patient care through science and through education and also through accreditation and quality control strategies. So we try to be as global as possible although this is easy to say, difficult to do, but we try to bring our mission to countries or to areas around the globe where stem cell transplantation is not an option or eventually the quality control processes are not being put in place. We try to do that through education, so we have quite a rich portfolio of educational activities, face-to-face educational activities, but also virtual educational activities through the virtual platform. And we also try to improve the attendance and to facilitate the attendance of physicians and nurses from different regions to our face-to-face meetings. Of course, EBMT is also open to receive collaboration from professionals from other areas in scientific projects and I think that in this way we help to implement the stem cell transplantation in areas where it’s not so implemented and to improve the results of stem cell transplantation.
Oncology Frontier-Hematology Frontier：As precision medicine and immunotherapies continue to evolve, hematopoietic cell transplantation stands at a pivotal point of transformation. Looking ahead to the next decade, what do you consider the main challenges facing the field? And what breakthroughs—technological or conceptual—do you find most promising and worth anticipating?
Professor Anna Sureda：So I think that if I have to look into the future, I would say that probably the use of autologous stem cell transplantation is going to decrease in the next few years, basically because of the advance and the positioning of other cellular therapy, such as CAR-T cells, basically in the field of lymphomas and multiple myelomas. We will have to improve the efficacy and decrease the toxicity of CAR-T cells to make them more effective and less toxic and more safe for the patients. If we talk about allogeneic stem cell transplant, I hope that we can develop better treatment strategies integrated into the allogeneic stem cell transplantation platform to try to decrease as much as possible relapse rate. We have been able to decrease non-relapse mortality with the use of reduced-intensity conditioning regimens but relapse rate still represents the major cause of failure of the treatment in our patients that are candidates for an allogeneic stem cell transplant. And we are entering or we are already in the era of targeted therapies so it would be important from a cellular therapy perspective and point of view to try to integrate targeted therapies with transplantation platforms to increase the efficacy of the process itself and to improve the long-term outcome of the patients.
