simply blood

Dear Friends and Colleagues, I write this message reflecting upon what was an unprecedented time for hematology and hematology researchers. Looking back on last year, I am truly amazed by how our Society reacted to our member’s experiences with lab shutdowns, socioeconomic upheaval in reaction to political injustice, travel restrictions and economic hardships. This period may compare to the years in which the society was founded (early 1970s), when concerns about nuclear disasters fueled radiation research, hematology and the further development of concepts around hematopoietic stem cell biology. Not only did we come together as a community this last year and implement many new initiatives to support our members, but we re-organized our annual meeting with short notice to adapt to the new virtual reality, and now are forging ahead with a new improved ISEH virtual 2.0 meeting for 2021. In this last year, many of our members have also independently developed new meeting and seminar forum...

In 2012, Dr. Rossi was the inaugural New Investigators Invited Speaker at the 41st Annual Scientific Meeting of ISEH. He generously agreed to be interviewed by a member of the New Investigator Committee about his captivating career path and successes in translating discoveries to the clinic. Among Dr. Rossi’s numerous accomplishments, we can list the development of an approach to generate induced pluripotent stem cells (IPSCs) using synthetic modified messenger RNA, which was named by Time magazine as one of the top ten medical breakthroughs of 2010. Dr. Rossi leveraged that technology to found Moderna Therapeutics, which is now a major supplier of vaccines against COVID-19. In 2015, Dr. Rossi co-founded Intellia Therapeutics, a publicly traded Cambridge-based company focused on developing CRISPR/Cas9-based therapeutics. In 2016, he co-founded Magenta Therapeutics, which is focused on transforming hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. In 2017, he helped launch Convelo Therapeutics, ...

Exploring Experimental Hematology : AMD3100 re-dosing fails to repeatedly mobilize hematopoietic stem cells in the non-human primate and humanized mouse Introduction: In this issue of Simply Blood, we are highlighting and deconstructing one of the journal’s latest manuscripts by first author Clare Samuelson. In a recent study in the laboratory of Dr. Hans-Peter Kiem (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center), Samuelson et al. examined the mobilization of hematopoietic stem/ progenitor cells (HSPCs) with repeated doses of AMD3100 (plerixafor). ( Samuelson et al., 2020 ). Stem cell transplantation (SCT), using bone marrow (BM) or mobilized peripheral blood (PB) HSPCs, is a therapy used to cure several cancers, including multiple myeloma, leukemia, lymphomas, and non-malignant hematological diseases. HSPCs are enriched in the PB using a mobilization agent(s), which is a non-invasive procedure compared to a BM harvest and may offer faster hematopoietic reconstitution. AMD3100 (plerixafor) is...

“I am afraid that the opinion remains that the paper is not a strong candidate for publication…” Rejection. Failure. Almost everyone will experience a mixture of these during one’s lifetime. But for a scientist, this has become the norm of our existence: failed scientific experiments, rejected grants, and scathing remarks from manuscript reviewers. The one thing that is certain in academia, is that you will have many failures; what is not as certain is one’s response to such adversity. I hope this piece can give practical advice on how to overcome ‘failure’ and even potentially change our perspective on what failure is, with an emphasis on what steps young scientists, such as graduate students who are just beginning their journey, can take. Turning your ‘negative’ response into a therapeutic one Our typical response to rejection in science (and most other endeavors) is an initial combination of anger and/or disappointment, that can progress to self-pity, blaming the ‘system’, and depre...

In a bid to connect the research being published in Experimental Hematology with the wider hematological community, we have begun to identify related pairs of recently published articles from other journals and in this entry, we focus on an article published in the European Hematology Association's journal HemaSphere. Novel approaches to understanding ALL treatment and subclone diversity Acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) results from malignant transformation of lymphoid progenitor cells, and is a blood cancer found predominantly in the pediatric population. Clinical prognosis for children diagnosed with ALL are amongst the best outcomes for all blood cancers, with about 90% of all patients surviving their disease. However, the remaining children who are refractory to therapy or suffer relapse still represent a significant clinical problem due to the high incidence of this disease in the pediatric population. As such, there remains tremendous importance in identifying the molec...

On behalf of the Awards Committee, ISEH would like to congratulate the recipients of the 2021 ISEH Honorific Awards, which will be presented at the ISEH 50th Annual Scientific Meeting. 2021 Donald Metcalf Award Winner: Tony Green Professor Anthony R. Green is a clinician-scientist and a long-standing member of the hematological community. He contributed multiple landmark papers during his career and shaped the hematological community through leadership roles in international organizations as well as locally in Cambridge, U.K.. Tony started his laboratory in Cambridge, U.K., in 1991 by characterizing the control of key transcription factors, such as SCL. Together with one of his first post-docs, Bertie Goettgens, he identified the first vertebrate hematopoietic stem cell enhancer to be characterized at a molecular level and demonstrated that SCL enhancers are powerful tools for targeting expression to specific cell types during hematopoiesis, vasculogenesis and neurogenesis.  Over t...

Love it or loathe it, having a profile on the internet -- and more specifically on a social media platform -- is becoming an important aspect of many scientific careers. Back in 2018, we covered the importance of joining the ever-growing online scientific community ( http://www.simplyblood.org/2018/02/should-scientists-use-twitter-answer-is.html ). Fast forward three years, and this remains true, not only for those who are just beginning to establish their scientific careers, but also for those who remember a time before the internet or social media existed. The platforms available for your social media presence are increasing and diverse, so navigating which might be useful in a professional setting can be overwhelming. The image below attempts to highlight how each of the major platforms can be used, but the remainder of this post will focus squarely on Twitter:  All the early adopters of Twitter will clearly recognize the power of Twitter for connecting and engaging with fello...