At Anthony Nolan, we help facilitate over 1000 stem cell transplants a day to give patients a second chance at life, and our medical officers play a crucial role in this process. They help review all our possible unrelated donors to make sure they are fit and healthy to donate, to make sure both the donor and the patient have the best possible experience of and outcomes from a transplant.
Dr Tania Dexter joined our team in July 2024. As well as playing this important role in making our transplants happen, she’ll be carrying out research into how we can continue to make the donation experience as positive and efficient as possible.
Find out more from our interview with her below.
Could you introduce yourself and your role at Anthony Nolan?
I’ve been working as a haematology doctor for the last four years. The field is changing all the time, with new drugs and ways of doing things, and so I felt having a background in research and clinical trials was important for me to keep learning and making sure I can always provide the best care to my patients.
Working at Anthony Nolan was the perfect way for me to do that. Our team lead donor-research to help find new ways to improve the donor experience – whether that be through making sure more donations can happen within one day, making the process less time consuming for the donor, or finding other new ways to give patients and donors the best outcomes.
At Anthony Nolan, I’ll be running my own research projects. I also help to review potential donors – checking they are fit and healthy to donate - giving me the chance to learn about the whole transplant process, rather than just what happens when a patient reaches hospital.
Tell us about your research and how it could help future donors and patients
My research focuses on how to make cell collection better for patients. Recently, I published a new paper to help guide the transplant community on the use of a new drug called plerixafor. The drug has already been used for many years in patients with myeloma and lymphoma to help collect more stem cells for autologous transplants (transplants where the patient’s own cells are transplanted after cancer treatment).
We’d like plerixafor to be used more often for unrelated donors, so we can collect more cells from them in one go and reduce the need for second-day donations. As well as being more convenient for the donors, this would also help free up much-needed donation slots from collection centres. Moreover, it will ensure that in the rare cases where the number of cells that are collected are too low for a successful transplant, we have an alternative option that will help us to collect more cells from that donor.
Our new paper, and hopefully our future research, will help us and the wider transplant community understand the best ways we can use plerixafor to make the donation process more efficient and easier for those involved.
What are you most excited for about working at Anthony Nolan?
I’m really looking forward to our new cell collection centre opening in Nottingham later this year. There’s a real shortage of collection slots available across the UK at the moment, which means we can only schedule around 1 in 5 donations on the day that has been requested by a patient’s medical team.
With the new centre we’ll have a lot more collection slots available, which will help our lifesaving transplants happen faster. And as it will be Anthony Nolan’s own centre, we’ll be able to use it to conduct new research and clinical trials into how to improve transplants in the future – something I’m really excited about.
What has been your biggest challenge?
In the NHS, I’m used to working under really intense pressure. On the wards I don’t stop because there’s always a million things to be doing.
My research work at Anthony Nolan is a lot more self-directed. I’m learning about how to carry out research, plan the project and pull everything together independently – which is new for me. I think it will be a fun and rewarding challenge though.
What do you hope will be different for patients and donors in the future?
I’m really excited about the difference our research will make to how quickly and easily donations can be done – and in turn that will help improve outcomes for patients. But I also really hope we see some improvements in graft-versus host disease (GvHD) in the next few years.
While working as a doctor, I spent a lot of time with patients recovering from transplant and dealing with very serious GvHD. I saw how difficult it is to deal with this side-effect – particularly when it affects the gut, or patients don’t have a large support network around them. I would love it if we could find new treatments and better ways of doing things to reduce the impact of GvHD on people.
Learn more about our research, including our work to improve GvHD, here.