The potential of transplant data
Stem cell transplants can save lives, but we have so much more to understand about how they work and how we can improve them so that every patient can survive and thrive. At Anthony Nolan and around the world, research projects are setting out to make the next big discovery that could change stem cell transplants forever.
Many of these research projects rely on accurate and complete healthcare data about patients and the outcomes of their transplants.
This allows scientists to spot patterns in what makes transplants successful, and identify new opportunities to make the process safer and more effective for patients.
Data on transplant patients has been collected by transplant centres on tens of thousands of patients over many decades, and this information could hold the key to discoveries with immeasurable impact for patients.
The problem is, data for each individual patient can also be complex, covering things from the medications they were given during their transplant to repeated blood test results over many years. This means that the data is often inconsistent between transplant centres – and can contain significant gaps.
Research from Anthony Nolan shows transplant centres lack the expertise and capacity to improve and use this data. While many employ data managers, they are not dedicated to research data specifically. Our research has shown that data managers often juggle many tasks and can lack the resources to focus on research-specific data.
This is where Anthony Nolan’s Research Data Manager Project comes in!
The Research Data Manager Project: First of its kind
Anthony Nolan’s Research Data Manager (RDM) Project is a first of its kind project in the UK, designed to show that research data managers embedded within transplant centres can make a huge difference to the quality and completeness of patient data, with the potential to drastically improve the impact of patient-centric research.
Through the project, research data managers employed by Anthony Nolan will work with transplant centres to bring their patient data up to the standard required for research – potentially making data from thousands more patients available to researchers across Europe and the UK.
You can imagine the state of transplant data as being like a treasure vault filled with rubies – but some rubies are covered in soot and therefore their true value is overlooked. The RDM project is a little bit like sending a team of gem experts into the vault to polish up those undervalued rubies so they can be fully appreciated!
The RDM Project started out with a single research data manager – our own Shelley Hewerdine, who completed two placements at London transplant centres UCLH (University College London Hospital) and KCH (King’s College Hospital). The results from this one-year pilot have now been published, and give us a glimpse into how successful wider funding of the project would be.
The main finding is that Shelley was able to improve a large amount of patient data at these two transplant centres, ultimately completing data for over 400 patients which will now be available for use in research projects across the UK and Europe.
The study also showed differences in data collection between the two transplant centres – this is an area where research data managers could help introduce consistency and make everyone’s job easier.
During the study, Shelley also assisted the data managers at both transplant centres with other important research projects, helping to reduce their workload and demonstrate further impact of the research data manager role.
Our results clearly demonstrate the benefits of additional data manager resources, providing much needed support to existing teams, and helping to improve patient outcomes by facilitating detailed research studies."
Hewerdine et al, 2026
A transplant data revolution in the UK
These initial findings show just how impactful a single research data manager can be. Multiple research data managers could make data from thousands more patients available to researchers.
“We are sitting on a goldmine of data that has the potential to revolutionise the landscape of stem cell transplants,” says Shelley Hewerdine, our first research data manager and first author of the new study. “Our project also has the potential to shift the way transplant centres in the UK operate, by freeing up staff to spend more time on their lifesaving work rather than responding to challenging data requests.”
Dr Neema Mayor, our director of immunogenetics and research services, highlights the need for more support in this growing area: “We believe research data managers could welcome in a new era of stem cell transplant research in the UK, and our project is the first attempt to make this a reality; but we need more funding. Our aim is to eventually fund six full-time research data managers, but we can’t do this on our own.”
Above: our research data manager Shelley Hewerdine presents initial findings from the project at a scientific conference
What you can do
You could save a life by joining the stem cell register – your cells could be what a patient somewhere in the world is waiting for. You can join if you’re between 16-30, and it takes just a few minutes to fill out the form.
Once you’ve joined, you can even opt in to our panel of donors for medical research and treatments if you’d like your cells to go towards research projects that could create a new generation of therapies for patients.
Full citation
Hewerdine S, Judge G, Lee J, Braund H, Allen H, Snowden JA, Carpenter B, Blake H, Venayakamoorthy Y, Potter V, Smith T, Vermeir L, Marsh SGE, Mayor NP. A Pilot Project to Evaluate the Benefit of Additional Support in Haematopoietic Cell Transplant (HCT) Research Data Management on Behalf of Anthony Nolan and BSBMTCT. EJHaem. 2026 Jan 31;7(1):e70235. doi: 10.1002/jha2.70235. PMID: 41623547; PMCID: PMC12859683.