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Chapel Hill – Thomas Shea, MD, will serve a two-year term as chair of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR). He was previously elected as chair-elect. The Advisory Committee establishes policy for, and provides scientific direction to the CIBMTR.

Shea is director of the UNC Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Transplantation Program and associate director of clinical outreach for UNC Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center.

The CIBMTR collects and stores data from over 400 transplant centers and 280,000 patients worldwide and makes these data openly available to interested research investigators and to the public. It has become one of the world’s largest clinical databases of blood and marrow transplantation outcomes. Its research partner, the National Marrow Donor Program, makes available thousands of matched tissue samples from transplant recipients and their donors through its Repository.

The CIBMTR, by using its large database, is also involved in the design and conduct of clinical studies that involve large numbers of patients from multiple transplant centers – the types of studies needed to answer critical questions in the field of blood and marrow transplantation.

In July 2004, the organization was formed by an affiliation of the research division of the National Marrow Donor Program® and the International Bone Marrow Transplant Registry /Autologous Blood and Marrow Transplant Registry (IBMTR/ABMTR).