Veno-occlusive disease is definitely a serious and potentially fatal complication after allogeneic stem cell transplantation. It can be also seen after auto transplant, but also outside the transplant setting. There are many risk factors that are well described. I think the key issue about VOD, if you want to improve patient outcome, is about early diagnosis and early intervention. I’m glad to announce here at this EBMT 2023 annual meeting that we have just seen actually the publication of the refined EBMT criteria in the journal Bone Marrow Transplantation, the official journal of the EBMT, which are probably going to help the physicians and all those stakeholders involved in the field of VOD management to identify earlier VOD or when VOD is suspected...
Veno-occlusive disease is definitely a serious and potentially fatal complication after allogeneic stem cell transplantation. It can be also seen after auto transplant, but also outside the transplant setting. There are many risk factors that are well described. I think the key issue about VOD, if you want to improve patient outcome, is about early diagnosis and early intervention. I’m glad to announce here at this EBMT 2023 annual meeting that we have just seen actually the publication of the refined EBMT criteria in the journal Bone Marrow Transplantation, the official journal of the EBMT, which are probably going to help the physicians and all those stakeholders involved in the field of VOD management to identify earlier VOD or when VOD is suspected. This is about the introduction of a sort of a new concept in the way we think about VOD diagnosis, and this is having like a probable VOD versus clinical VOD versus proven VOD. I think this new entity of suspecting or having a probable VOD is extremely important because it will allow early identification, eventually early intervention but if for some reason it’s proving not to be a VOD case, then you can move differently in another path and maybe stop any VOD treatment. So, I think this is a crucial advance, a crucial I think a very important step in this field of VOD since 2016 when we published the EBMT revised criteria for VOD diagnosis and staging. So, I think it will take us some time to educate and to disseminate how to implement these refined criteria. But I’m very optimistic that the community will embrace this new system, or this refined system, I would say, because this will allow, in my opinion, to further improve the management of these patients. And always this is about good news because we want to see more and more patients in responding to treatment but also avoid the fatality or the complications or the multi-organ dysfunction or multi-organ failure that can lead to deaths in relation with VOD.
