Reporting from EAHAD, which met virtually for its 2022 Congress on Bleeding Disorder Treatment and Care

Written by Aaron Dennis, February 23, 2022

In February, the European Association for Haemophilia and Allied Disorders had their annual meeting. We joined them to hear the latest updates on bleeding disorder care and the future of treatments to inform our work and better support you, our members.

The keynote lecture looked at inhibitor development and plans to expand our knowledge of why certain people develop inhibitors while thinking of new ways to treat or to manage them. Even with new treatments, inhibitors remain a major complication of haemophilia treatment that still needs better management.

We heard a range of updates on new and innovative ways of treating haemophilia (with and without inhibitors), VWD, Glanzman’s and potentially other bleeding disorders by rebalancing the clotting cascade. New potential treatments include anti-TFPI, antithrombin inhibitors and serine protease inhibitors. All of these have the potential to be licensed over the next few years and may see use in the NHS if they continue to have positive results in clinical trials.

We also got updates on the latest gene therapy trials as well as future plans for other gene therapies using different methods of delivery. We will go into the latest gene therapy trials and data in much more detail in a future article.

Other talks included an in depth look at how EHL factor IX products differ in how they absorbed in different parts of the body, how bleeding disorder care is maintained in times of crisis and studies in how long term pain and joint damage can be managed better.

Over the next few weeks we will share more detail on future of bleeding disorder care with deeper dives into the latest on gene therapy in haemophilia, potential breakthroughs in Glanzmann’s and diagnosis and care for people with inhibitors. Watch this space for new Congress reports, or follow our social media to see when new articles are published.