EHA 2025 | EHA Publication Prize: the development of the ICAHT grading system

It’s a great honor to receive this year’s EHA Publication Prize. This is really a testament to the entire team behind this effort, which really involved many stakeholders from many different European sites. And so it’s really a team award and I want to sort of highlight that first and foremost. 

One of the main issues that we had with CAR T-cell related hematological toxicity is that we knew that it was a really common side effect, it predisposed for infectious complications, but we didn’t really have a standardized grading system. So the way that we approached this problem was that we first did a European survey which ended up actually being a worldwide survey of current practice patterns regarding hematologic toxicity so cytopenias after CAR T-cell therapy and this is what the publication prize is for this year for the results that we published in Hemasphere more than two years ago and these results really highlighted that there’s deficiencies in grading, a high degree of heterogeneity in both diagnosis of CAR T-cell related hematological toxicity, as well as grading and management. And so because of this survey, we ended up instigating a European-wide effort on behalf of both EHA and EBMT to develop, first to define immune effector cell-associated hemotoxicity, or ICAHT, as a distinct toxicity category of cell therapy, and then to develop a novel grading system and delineate management recommendations based on clinical severity grades. So again, a great honor to receive the award this year and a testament to the many European stakeholders involved in making this a possibility.

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