How do doctors know what treatment is likely to help which patient? Data. And lots of it. Years, no decade after decade of it. While you probably won’t ever see a TV series with the likes of a dreamy Patrick Dempsey playing the role of key data manager, here at Arrow, we think data managers and data analysts are pretty special.

And so do the people at Jazz Pharmaceuticals.

Meet the first recipient of the Jazz Pharmaceuticals Award

We’re proud to announce that our first ever Jazz Pharmaceuticals Award has been awarded to Alia Cibich to help her attend the 2024 Tandem Meeting of American Society of Transplant and Cellular Therapies (ASTCT) and Centre for International Bone Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) being held in San Antonio, Texas.

Alia is the Clinical Data Manager at the Bone Marrow Transplant Unit at Royal Adelaide Hospital. She maintains a statewide clinical database with over 2,000 patients spanning more than 40 years. Alia has a special interest in the late complications of allogeneic stem cell transplant. In her time as Data Manager, she has led and contributed to multiple clinical audits and reviews, the findings of which have been presented at numerous international meetings.

Alia is also a PhD candidate through the University of Adelaide where she will be investigating the epidemiology, pathogenesis, and management of subsequent cancers after transplant. She brings a unique lived experience to her research as the child and carer of a transplant survivor. Alia understands first hand the challenges patients and their loved ones experience during and after treatment – a huge motivator for her work.

Cancer after cancer?

Development of subsequent new cancers is a devastating late complication after transplant, and there is still a lot to learn about the reasons for the development of these cancers and their best clinical management. Alia’s research aims to help fill these gaps in knowledge. She has started working with the South Australian dataset, and will present her findings from that initial work at the Tandem Conference.

Attending the conference in person will also allow Alia to form pivotal international collaborations, accessing international datasets to validate her initial findings.

“I feel incredibly privileged to be awarded this scholarships and be afforded the opportunity to accelerate my research,” Alia said.

We look forward to hearing about the Tandem Conference from Alia when she returns.

If you are a nurse or allied health professional working in the field of bone marrow or cell transplant therapy and have plans to attend a conference or scientific meeting, please visit the travel and conference scholarships page of our website.