ASH 2023 | The UK Impact Transplant Trials Network: a national strategy to accelerate delivery of alloSCT RCTs

The increased availability of donors and the advent of reduced-intensity conditioning regimens has led to allogeneic transplant, particularly in diseases like acute myeloid leukemia, becoming an ever more important part of the treatment algorithm. And despite the fact that patients with essentially incurable disease can have long-term survival, still up to 50% of patients after a transplant will die from transplant toxicity or relapse. So there’s an urgent requirement for us to establish an infrastructure that allows us to deliver prospective clinical trials, asking how do we improve patient outcomes after transplant? Despite that urgent need, it remains the case across the world that fewer than 5% of patients go on to such trials, and therefore a lot of transplant practice is based on retrospective registry data, which can often be misleading. So in the UK, we’ve set up a network with embedded research nurses in major hospitals, which has allowed us to randomize more than 1300 patients to prospective clinical trials in transplant just over the last five years.