Chairperson and committee
Chairperson: Denese Marks (Australia)
Vice Chair: Susanne Marschner (USA)
Junio Vice Chair: Linda Larsson (Sweden)
Secretary: Lacey Johnson (Australia)
Treasurer: Jason Acker (Canada)
Education Officer: Susanne Marschner (USA)
Junior Education Officer: Ben Wood (Australia)
Membership
The working party currently has 33 members representing 20 different countries.
Elections were held in April 2024 for a new Vice Chair, and a Junior Vice Chair (mid-career researcher) was also appointed to enable succession planning. Dr Susanne Marschner was elected as Vice Chair, and Dr Linda Larsson was elected as Junior Vice Chair.
Meetings and Teleconferences
Core members of the working party continue to meet, to plan activities for 2025-2026. The WP met three times during 2024-25, including the annual business meeting.
Activities during the period
- The WP organised a session on cold-stored platelets, which was held during the Congress in Barcelona on Tuesday 25 June. The speakers were Lacey Johnson, Moritz Stolla and Phil Spinella. The session was extremely well-attended, with standing room only and over 100 attendees.
- The WP held the annual business meeting during the ISBT Congress in Barcelona in June 2024. 19 members attended (in person and via Zoom), as well as 5 corporate partner representatives and the Board Liaison Officer.
Discussions during the meeting included:
- Non-DEHP: review of what the blood centres in different regions are doing and update from manufacturers that were present.
- Topics for future webinars
During the meeting the two sub-groups met:
- Laboratory devices for component quality control
- Extracellular vesicles in blood components.
- Collaborated with the Clinical Transfusion WP to write updates for 9 blood component pages on Wikipedia.
- The WP organised an educational webinar held on 2 April 2025, entitled “Cryopreserved platelets: what we believed, what we now know, and where to next!”. The speakers were A/Prof Lacey Johnson and Prof Michael Reade. There were ~300 members registered for the webinar and many attendees stayed online to answer questions after the webinar had finished.
- The WP provided a speaker for a corporate webinar hosted by TerumoBCT. The webinar was held in November 2024, entitled “Strategies to maintain a sustainable supply of platelets” presented by A/Prof Lacey Johnson. There were ~300 members registered for the webinar.
- A survey has been sent to all WP members to find out which topics they would like to focus on and areas where more education can be provided. The survey will be reviewed in an upcoming face-to-face meeting.
Financial
The Blood Components WP did not incur any costs or receive income in 2024-2025.
€4,910 has been allocated to the WP by the ISBT Board for the face-to-face meeting in Edinburgh. These funds will be used in April/May 2025.
