Meet the 2026 AABB Annual Meeting’s Keynote Speaker: Frederick Appelbaum, MD

At the upcoming 2026 AABB Annual Meeting, to be held Oct. 17-19 in Atlanta, attendees will have the privilege of hearing a keynote speech from a true giant in medicine: Frederick Appelbaum, MD.

Appelbaum is the executive vice president at Fred Hutch and a professor in Fred Hutch’s clinical research division. He has been an influential leader in the blood and biotherapies field for decades, authoring or coauthoring more than 800 peer-reviewed articles. Among his many accomplishments, early in his career, Appelbaum described the first use of autologous transplantation as curative therapy for malignant lymphoma; this therapy is now used to treat more than 50,000 patients annually. Later in his career, Appelbaum led the first studies demonstrating the ability of transplantation to cure myelodysplasia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma and Hodgkin disease, as well as its role in the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia. Appelbaum was also instrumental in developing gemtuzumab ozogamicin, the first antibody-drug conjugate approved by the FDA.

Tracing History

In his keynote address, Appelbaum will trace the arc of bone marrow transplantation – from its earliest days to the frontier of in vivo gene therapy – and will detail the critical role of the blood banking and transfusion medicine community.

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“I'm going to talk about the history of marrow transplantation from the very beginning – all the way back to its roots with the atomic bombs in the 1940s,” Appelbaum told AABB News. “I’ll discuss the arc of how marrow transplantation went from not really being possible to eventually becoming a real therapy that today is used to treat about 100,000 people every year.”

Appelbaum also said he plans to discuss the future potential of bone marrow transplantation. “It is an area of medicine with countless possibilities,” he said. “Future implications include in vivo gene therapy, where we could be able to cure sickle cell anemia with a single injection. We are also looking at the use of CAR T-cells to treat not just hematologic malignancies, but solid tumors and autoimmune diseases. Most recently, some scientists are even looking into curing HIV/AIDS through CAR T cells.”

Connections and Collaboration

Appelbaum plans to highlight the historical relationship between bone marrow transplantation and transfusion medicine, including AABB’s own early role as a model for field regulation and self-governance, and how a strong blood bank infrastructure was foundational to making transplant medicine possible.

“The reason that the Fred Hutch facility is in Washington State is because Don Thomas was very impressed with the blood bank community in Seattle – and that's one of the reasons he moved to Seattle,” Appelbaum explained. “Once Thomas got here, and was trying to make transplantation work, he relied on the use of HLA-matched platelets and granulocyte transfusions – all things that were done through the blood bank – to help patients to survive the early transplant experience.”

Appelbaum also noted that working with blood banks helped improve mortality for patients undergoing marrow transplantation. “Early on, when I was first in the field, about half of our patients were CMV-seropositive, which meant they had a 50% chance of getting CMV disease after the transplant – and of those, about 50% would die. However, through our work with blood banks, we realized that we could give patients CMV-seronegative blood products, which protected them from getting CMV.”

It Takes a Village

Appelbaum said an underlying message of his speech will be that it takes a full field of professionals – not merely one individual – to achieve advancements in patient care.

“We’ve seen tremendous advancements in health care, and everyone who is involved in the field should take pride in what the field has achieved, because these accomplishments are not done by just one person; the field achieves these,” Appelbaum said. “At the end of the day, it does take a village; it takes a big village to get what we've done accomplished.”

Appelbaum added that the effects of the field’s collective advancements are seen in the millions of patients who have benefited from advanced treatments. “Today we see many patients – or former patients – that are alive and healthy that may have died in another era without certain therapeutic advancements that are available today,” he said. “And I think the whole field can take pride in that.”