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EBMT 2023 | EBMT highlights: Van Bekkum & Basic Science Awards

Mohamad Mohty, MD, PhD, Saint-Antoine Hospital, Paris, France, comments on the abstracts that received the Van Bekkum and Basic Science awards at this year’s EBMT meeting. The Van Bekkum Award recognized a groundbreaking Phase III trial that investigated vedolizumab’s role in preventing graft-versus-host disease (GvHD; NCT03657160). The other award focused on the mechanisms that lead to poorer outcomes after transplantation in patients with low microbiota diversity. The findings from this study will pave the way for interventions like fecal microbiota transplantation (FMT) and microbiota modulation to improve transplant outcomes. This interview took place at the 49th Annual Meeting of the European Group for Blood and Marrow Transplantation (EBMT) held in Paris, France.

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Transcript (edited for clarity)

Like every year during the EBMT 2023 Annual Congress, we have two major awards. We have the Van Bekkum award and it’s mainly given to a key practice changing clinical work. And this year, we had a fantastic, randomized Phase III trial looking into the role of vedolizumab into GvHD prophylaxis. This Phase III international randomized trial could show that vedolizumab can be an excellent agent to prevent GvHD...

Like every year during the EBMT 2023 Annual Congress, we have two major awards. We have the Van Bekkum award and it’s mainly given to a key practice changing clinical work. And this year, we had a fantastic, randomized Phase III trial looking into the role of vedolizumab into GvHD prophylaxis. This Phase III international randomized trial could show that vedolizumab can be an excellent agent to prevent GvHD. This is extremely important because if you look in the last 20 or 30 years, actually this is for the first time that we have an agent which is effective in terms of GvHD prevention. The other award we have every year during EBMT is a basic science or translational science award and this year it was about the broader domain of microbiota modulation. Actually, the whole story started with the diversity of the microbiota and it was shown now since more than ten years that those patients with a low diversity microbiota, when they receive a transplant, are going to experience a lower outcome. Their outcome when it comes to GvHD, when it comes to different complications, are not very good compared to those patients with a high diversity microbiota. But then the big question is how to explain this and in this work that was given the basic research award and that was featured actually in the EBMT newsletter that you can see on the EBMT website, actually the authors, the investigators, looks into actually the metabolites and they could find that actually this low diversity is in relation with the absence of certain mandatory or very important metabolites which are very crucial in this setting. So this will pave the way for different interventions in order to improve the outcome of patients with low diversity, either through fecal microbiota transplantation and there are some nice ongoing trials and in this congress there are several oral sessions dedicated and showing the benefit of FMT in different situations, especially refractory acute GvHD.  This will be presented by Professor Mallard but we have also a nice session, educational session presented by Dr. Battipaglia but also the other pathway, or the way to modulate and improve the outcome of the low diversity, would be around creating or making specific consortia that are able to fulfill the need of these metabolites. So, it’s a totally new frontier in medicine in my opinion and this will definitely, I think again, I’m a believer in this field of microbiota and this will definitely contribute to further advancing the hematology field. But also, I think the broader field of cancer and all of this is about increasing the survival of patient but also decreasing the incidence of some deleterious complications.

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Disclosures

Gilead: Honoraria; GSK: Honoraria; Pfizer,: Honoraria; Adaptive Biotechnologies: Honoraria; Oncopeptides: Honoraria; Astellas: Honoraria; Novartis: Honoraria; Takeda: Honoraria; Amgen: Honoraria; Jazz Pharmaceuticals: Honoraria, Research Funding; Celgene: Honoraria; Bristol Myers Squibb: Honoraria; Sanofi: Honoraria, Research Funding; Janssen: Honoraria, Research Funding.