What to look out for at ASH 2025
With the ASH 2025 Annual Meeting and Exposition (6–9 December, Orlando, FL, USA) approaching, we’re excited to share our agenda highlights. Featuring over 8,200 accepted abstracts, ASH 2025 offers a comprehensive educational and scientific program with hundreds of sessions spanning industry symposia to specialized workshops, plus an expo of cutting-edge technology.
The meeting continues its tradition of excellence in discussing inherited bone marrow failure syndromes while highlighting an emerging focus on hemostasis and thrombosis, particularly coagulation pathway regulation and novel biomarker discovery.
Key topics covered:
- Transplantation and cellular therapy: covering advanced conditioning regimens, graft-versus-tumor optimization and expanding transplant access to older, medically frail patients.
- Aging and hematopoiesis: presentations will explore how chronological age affects blood cell function; covering niche biology, single-cell technologies and therapeutic strategies to reset aging hematopoiesis.
- Pain management in sickle cell disease: focusing on breakthrough non-opioid approaches, molecular pain mechanisms, non-pharmacological interventions and bone disease contributions to pain pathophysiology.
- Cancer metabolism: sessions will examine how nutrients constrain cancer cell metabolism, mitochondrial stress in immunity and targeting oncometabolites such as 2-hydroxyglutarate in treatment-resistant cancers.
Marquee Session and Lecture Highlights
Presidential Symposium
Date: Tuesday, 9 December
Time: 09:45–11:15
Room: OCCC – West Hall D2
Opening the Presidential Symposium, Belinda Avalos (ASH President, Atrium Health Levine Cancer, NC, USA) will chair a comprehensive exploration of “Clonal hematopoiesis and the path to myeloid malignancy.”
- Jane Churpek (University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI, USA) will describe currently known hereditary hematologic malignancy predisposition syndromes, illustrating how individual syndromes reveal insights into normal hematopoiesis mechanisms and syndrome-specific clonal hematopoiesis patterns.
- Eric Pietras (University of Colorado, CO, USA) will address the intersection between metabolism and inflammation as drivers of hematopoietic stem cell selection, discussing how microenvironmental inflammation triggers reduced fitness of normal cells while mutant clones use these signals to facilitate expansion.
- DiPersio (Washington University School of Medicine, MO, USA) will discuss synergistic effects of combining novel CXCR4 and VLA-4 inhibitors for stem cell mobilization, JAK inhibitors to reduce graft-versus-host disease, and the need for prospective studies investigating risk-adapted prophylaxis strategies.
Plenary Scientific Session
Date: Sunday, 7 December
Time: 14:00–16:00
Room: OCCC – West Hall D2
This prestigious session will feature groundbreaking research presentations including:
- Othman Al-Sawaf (University of Cologne, Germany) who will present results from the randomized CLL17 trial comparing fixed-duration versus continuous targeted treatment for previously untreated chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
- Anoosha Habibi (Hôpitaux Universitaires Henri Mondor, France) will share findings from the escort-HU cohort studies on pregnancy outcomes in sickle cell patients treated with hydroxyurea.
- Sanket Shah (Weill Cornell Medicine, NY, USA) will present on SASP-driven immune evasion defining a novel African ancestry-associated DLBCL subtype.
- Amir T. Fathi (Massachusetts General Hospital, MA, USA) will discuss results from the PARADIGM phase 2 study comparing azacitidine and venetoclax to conventional induction chemotherapy for newly diagnosed fit adults with acute myeloid leukemia.
Scientific Symposiums
Discovering the biology of hematopoiesis through studies of bone marrow failure syndromes
Date: Saturday, 6 December
Time: 14:00–15:15
Room: Hyatt – Plaza Int’l HIJK
Deena Iskander (Imperial, London, UK) will demonstrate how clinical and genetic data from a National Clinical Registry can be integrated with single-cell assays to decipher genotype-specific mechanisms in Diamond-Blackfan anemia, showing how mutations in ribosomal subunit genes differentially affect erythroid development.
Luis Batista (Washington University School of Medicine, MO, USA) will discuss connections between telomerase biogenesis and marrow failure, presenting discoveries in pathways that regulate hTR biogenesis and how these can be modulated to prevent decay and improve hematopoiesis.
Meng Wang (Cornell University, NY, USA) will explore how aldehyde-induced DNA damage triggers hematopoietic stem cell exhaustion and aging in Fanconi anemia, discussing metabolic origins of pathogenic aldehydes and therapeutic strategies for enhanced aldehyde detoxification.
Ouch-it hurts: mechanisms of the origin, perception and evolution of pain in sickle cell disease
Date: Saturday, 6 December
Time: 14:00–15:15
Room: OCCC – W308
Kalpna Gupta (University of California, CA, USA) will provide an overview of the current understanding of sickle cell pain mechanisms, highlighting novel molecular and cellular pharmacologic approaches and advancements in non-invasive technologies that have potential for clinical translation.
Bin He (Carnegie Mellon University, PA, USA) will discuss non-pharmacological approaches for treating pain and neuroscience mechanisms underlying transcranial focused ultrasound neuromodulation for non-invasive, circuit-specific brain stimulation.
Jahnavi Gollamudi University of Cincinnati, OH, USA) will focus on SCD-associated bone disease contributions to chronic pain pathophysiology, discussing mechanisms underlying bone complications and how bone cells interact with nociceptive nerves, plus bisphosphonates as potential non-opioid options.
Targeting cancer metabolism – innovative methods to translation
Date: Monday, 8 December
Time: 14:45–16:00
Room: OCCC – W312
Matthew Vander Heiden (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MA, USA) will discuss how environmental nutrients constrain leukemia metabolism to impact therapy, suggesting mechanisms by which metabolic adaptations might lead to gene expression changes contributing to disease progression and therapy resistance.
Jeffrey Rathmell (University of Chicago, IL, USA) will explore mechanisms by which metabolic pathways regulate immune cell function, highlighting how mitochondria respond to stress including fever – a common stress reflecting mild heat shock that can lead to mitochondrial dysfunction with implications for cell fate and cancer response.
Andrew Intlekofer (Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, NY, USA) will describe mechanistic studies of unusual drug resistance mutations in isocitrate dehydrogenase (IDH), leading to the discovery that genetic or pharmacologic hyperactivation of mutant IDH unleashes metabolic toxicity that selectively eliminates IDH-mutant leukemia cells.
Additional sessions to bookmark
ASH Poster Walks
Date: Various
Time: Multiple sessions
Room: Several locations
Seven specialized “walks” will showcase emerging hematology science in virtual and in-person formats with the Blood Journal Studio. Each walk features up to six posters with brief overviews and interactive Q&A sessions.
Scientific workshops
Date: Friday, 5 December
Time: Various times
Room: Multiple locations
The 2025 Scientific Workshops offer interactive discussions on the latest developments across comprehensive hematologic topics, available both in-person and via live streaming on the ASH annual meeting platform.
Looking ahead
ASH 2025 represents a pivotal moment in hematology, bridging fundamental discoveries in aging, metabolism and inherited disorders with innovative therapeutic approaches. The comprehensive program addresses critical knowledge gaps while fostering collaboration across subspecialties.
The meeting’s emphasis on pain management, aging mechanisms and metabolic targeting reflects the field’s evolution toward more personalized and less toxic treatments.
Registration guidance and additional information are available through the official ASH website as the December 6–9 meeting dates approach.