EHA news
An article in the New England Journal of Medicine in January entitled ‘Selling Bone Marrow-Flynn v. Holder by Glen Cohen1 reports on a disturbing development in the USA. Cohen reviews a recent judgment by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit which held that a ban on selling ‘bone marrow,’ that is part of the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) of 1984,2 does not encompass ‘peripheral blood stem cells’. The judgment, according to Cohen, is based on the statutory interpretation of NOTA, not on the plaintiff’s more radical claim that the prohibition on selling bone marrow violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution.
In their Reflection paper on risk based management in clinical trials the European Medicines Agency (EMA) is aiming to describe the concept of risk based quality management in the setting of clinical research.
EHA and the European Cancer Patient Coalition co-hosted a meeting at the European Parliament in Brussels on August 30-31, 2011. The two-day conference was attended by doctors, researchers, parliamentarians, patient advocates and Commission officials. The full report of this meeting is available here.
Research into blood-related diseases saves and improves the lives of millions of EU citizens each year, but lack of awareness of this fact means that too often, funding does not feed directly enough into advancing the treatment of patients.
On the 30th and 31st of August a conference will be hosted in the European Parliament that will demonstrate the leading role hematology will have in securing the future knowledge economy envisaged in the Europe 2020 Strategy.
Dr A van Hylckama Vlieg was recently awarded the very first Joint Fellowships of the European Hematology Association (EHA)-International Society on Thrombosis and Haemostasis (ISTH) at the16th Congress of EHA in London, UK.