Chairperson and committee
Chairperson: Denese Marks (Australia)
Vice Chair: Election in progress
Secretary: Lacey Johnson (Australia)
Treasurer: Jason Acker (Canada)
Education Officer: Susanne Marschner (USA)
Other Executive members:
Rebecca Cardigan (UK)
Pieter van der Meer (Netherlands)
Neil Beckman (Australia/UK)
Membership
The working party currently has 24 members representing 15 different countries.
Unfortunately, the WP Vice Chair, Dr Dana Davine, resigned in 2023. Elections are currently being held (closing 15 April 2024) for a new Vice Chair, and a Junior Vice Chair (early-mid career researcher) will also be appointed to enable succession planning.
We are endeavouring to recruit younger members to the WP, and of our new members in 2023/24, three are early-mid career researchers.
Meetings and Teleconferences
Core members of the working party continue to meet, to plan activities for 2024-2025. The WP met three times during 2023-24, including the annual business meeting.
Additional meetings with smaller sub-groups were held to co-ordinate the webinar (see point 3 below), and to agree upon content for the WP web pages (see point 4 below).
Activities during the period
- The WP held the annual business meeting during the ISBT Congress in Gothenburg in June 2023. 13 members attended (in person and via Zoom), as well as 6 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.
During the meeting it was agreed to establish two sub-groups:
- Laboratory devices for component quality control
- Extracellular vesicles in blood components
Future topics of interest:
- Develop guideline on how to write proper component manufacturing descriptions in manuscripts;
- Biotinylation of platelets or alternatives for survival and recovery studies
- Automation: experiences with robotics and automation at different blood centres
- Susanne Marschner was appointed as the WP Education Officer
- The WP organised an educational webinar, held on 8 November 2023, entitled “Transition to non-DEHP blood bag systems: a regulatory and scientific overview”. The speakers were Thomas Klei and Linda Larsson.
- Our Education Officer has worked with the ISBT Office team to update the WP web pages. Additional pages have been added, including resources and guidelines, key publications and WP activities.
- The WP prepared a session proposal (topic: cold-stored platelets), which was accepted for inclusion in the programme at the 2024 ISBT Congress in Barcelona.
- The Blood Components WP will work with the Clinical Transfusion WP (Wikipedia sub-group) to update a series of Wikipedia pages on blood components.
Financial
The Blood Components WP did not incur any costs or receive income in 2023-2024.
