President’s Letter
Last year, FACT celebrated its 20th anniversary and spent the year reflecting on its history and celebrating its accomplishments. This year, the FACT Board of Directors participated in a strategic planning retreat to envision future successes and what FACT needs to do to achieve them. The two-day retreat was filled with questions, laughter, debate, and discussion. All of this culminated into defining objectives and strategic goals for the years 2017 through 2020 that we are excited and eager to pursue.
Though FACT is poised to be a player in many exciting developments in the field of cellular therapy, we have not lost our focus on our mission: to improve the quality of cellular therapy through standards, accreditation, and education for the benefit of patients. Indeed, every new initiative we begin will ultimately become a routine part of fulfilling our mission through our core services. Many of our defining objectives and strategic goals relate to organizational infrastructure to maintain our strength and flexibility to address emerging issues as they come.
Our ability to respond to the needs of the field, using new and improved resources to do so, directly impacts the care our patients receive. By doing this, we also strengthen our relationships with like-minded organizations and develop new collaborations with colleagues in different capacities. This allows us to push the envelope on our ability to evaluate and encourage quality practices with synergistic efficiency. Our clinical outcomes improvement and data management initiatives, both made possible by the efforts of the Center for International Blood & Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR), harness the power of data to improve patient survival and research. Our close collaboration with our peers in the Latin America Blood and Marrow Transplantation Group (LABMT) is improving the quality of transplantation in new regions of the world. Our new accreditation program for immune effector cellular (IEC) therapy, largely created in response to requests from commercial biological product manufacturers, has been mutually beneficial and educational and, hopefully, will improve access to new and lifesaving cellular therapies. Our work with the Cardiovascular Cell Therapy Research Network (CCTRN) is leveraging our experience and the CCTRN’s cardiovascular expertise to evaluate how FACT can help even more patients in more specialties.
Sincerely,
Dennis Gastineau, MD
