ASCAT 2023 | ASCAT 2023: goals and current projects

I’ll introduce you to the concept of ASCAT. ASCAT- obviously the full name is Academy for Sickle Cell and Thalassemia and obviously the conference [has the same name] and this is the 18th year and it’s actually changed over a long period of time from the beginning, of very small numbers, and now we are into numbers that are exceeding between 5 to 6 hundred. The main essence of ASCAT is to offer an opportunity for clinicians to meet up with scientists, researchers, and also we are increasing the number and involvement of patients. But the main thing, if you see from the theme or basically like our strapline, is to improve the lives of people living with sickle cell disease and thalassemia. It offers young people an opportunity to present their work, an opportunity to demonstrate what they actually understand and what they know, but also an opportunity to meet other people who are very senior in the field.

A registered charity now? Yes. So we’re very excited about that because all the years we’ve been working with support of the Guy’s and St. Thomas’s Hospital, where I have been a consultant and a lead clinician. But now we’re kind of going to the next phase and for it to now become a charity. So becoming a charity, which was approved around March/April 2023, allows us to function with a clear governance that doesn’t need any additional governance from somewhere else, but it’s a governance within a set up and allows us to develop more initiative.

I think one of the initiatives that we really want to make sure we develop is to have the opportunity to support people from low- and middle-income countries, so we can support them to come to conferences but actually we also could work in other countries because this charity has been registered, it includes the opportunity to work in Lebanon, to work in Egypt and to work in Nigeria. So it’s possible that we are able to make an impact and we can actually transfer that to some of those centers.

The outside project that we have now is to support some work that provides therapies for sickle cell patients in Nigeria. So we’re actually going to talk about it tonight. So supplying hydroxyurea, which is one of the common treatments for sickle cell disease, but making sure that these patients can afford the treatment, access the treatment, and when they receive the treatment we can actually follow them up, because sometimes it’s very difficult for them to get the treatment and even to come back for follow up, just the cost of transportation can be more challenging. So that’s how we’re supporting that one. And also we want to support the development of a center of excellence whereby it supports diagnosis treatments for sickle cell disease in Nigeria, but also doing the same thing in Lebanon.