Over the last year Anthony Nolan has helped find donors for over 1,200 blood cancer patients in need of a stem cell transplant. Since Shirley Nolan established the world’s first bone marrow register four decades ago, over 14,000 people have been given a second chance of life.
Our work to recruit donors and match them with patients continues today, but none of it would be possible without
the scientific trailblazerswho have pushed forward our understanding of stem cells and their lifesaving potential.
We owe much to early pioneers like Edward Donnall Thomas, the Texan doctor who carried out the first – but ultimately unsuccessful – bone marrow transplant in 1959, and to French scientist Georges Mathé, who shocked the world four years later by being the first to announce that a patient’s leukaemia had been cured by a bone marrow transplant.
The more recent discovery that immature stem cells in umbilical cord blood can be used in transplant was also an important leap forward; in 1988 Dr Eliane Gluckman performed the first cord blood transplant to help a five-year-old boy with aplastic anaemia. The procedure was a success, and today we have over 4,000 cords banked for use in transplant.
The fact that three people a day receive stem cells from an unrelated donor is only possible because inspired and inspiring individuals were able to make important breakthroughs and share their insight with the rest of the world.
However, we still face the reality that one of those three patients receiving a transplant today will not survive their first year after treatment. This is a stark reminder that, despite the remarkable progress that has been made in stem cell transplantation in the last sixty years, we are still in need of breakthroughs.
It’s clear that the key to improving patient outcomes lies not only in finding more donors, but also in stimulating more research. Worryingly, however, fewer than 1 in 20 patients are currently entered into clinical trials which could help improve transplant outcomes.
The breakthroughs that patients need will come in time, but we can accelerate the process if we create the infrastructure necessary for success. We have the know-how and capability here in the UK – and our challenge to is provide the best possible environment in which our scientists can flourish.
We don’t have to look very far for inspiration. The
Trials Acceleration Programme, run and funded by Bloodwise, is a fantastic example of how set up clinical studies, recruit patients and deliver innovative new treatments more quickly and efficiently.
By providing a network though which researchers can collaborate and run clinical trials simultaneously across the country, the Trials Acceleration Programme has cut the journey time for new treatments from the lab to the patient from up to ten years to just two years on average.
The success has been widely recognised.
In a Commons debate in Septemberthe Life Sciences Minister George Freeman MP referred to those involved in the programme as “trailblazers for the wider programme of accelerated access.”
We couldn’t agree more, and that’s why we want to replicate the model for stem cell transplant. Earlier this year we published
Destination: Cure, in which we called for a clinical trials platform to be established to help overcome the regulatory and logistical barriers that currently undermine the progress of valuable studies.
It’s a vision of the future in which the transplant community has the infrastructure, resource and capacity required to conduct groundbreaking research – and ultimately ensure that more blood cancer patients are fully cured of their disease.
We are working hard to make that vision a reality, and we’re proud to be collaborating with a number of organisations who share our vision, including the National Institute of Health Research.
But there is still more to do. We’ll continue to engage policymakers to ensure that, with the full backing of government, we will deliver a research environment fit for the stem cell trailblazers of the future.
www.anthonynolan.org/destinationcurereport