David Maloney, MD, PhD from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, Seattle, WA reviews the spirited debate entitled, ‘Have new drugs made stem cell transplantation obsolete’, which took place during the International Conference on Malignant Lymphoma (ICML) 2017 held in Lugano, Switzerland. The consensus from the debate was that, while the treatment landscape in lymphoma is moving towards more targeted therapies, stem cell transplantation is the only available ‘cure’ for high-risk patients and so it is not superseded by novel agents.