Eliane Gluckman, MD
Dr. Eliane Gluckman is well known for her important contributions to transplantation. She performed the first successful human umbilical cord blood transplant and, with colleague Hal Broxmeyer, PhD, successfully showed that unrelated cord blood could be used as a source of hematopoietic stem cells. Dr. Gluckman is a founding member and former president of the European Group of Bone Marrow Transplantation and the Head of the Department of Bone Marrow Transplantation at the Hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris. Her research continues to focus on the transplantation of umbilical cord blood and congenital bone marrow failure.

E. Donnall Thomas, MD
Dr. Edward Donnall Thomas, known as Don to his friends, was born in a small town in central Texas in 1920. His most notable achievement, the Nobel Prize in Medicine, was awarded in 1990 for his development of bone marrow transplantation, which could cure patients with advanced leukemia. Dr. Thomas is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Washington and Director Emeritus of the Clinical Research Division at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

Dirk van Bekkum, MD, PhD
In the 1950s and 60s, Dr. Dirk van Bekkum’s laboratory made critical observations of “a secondary disease” after transplantation, now known as graft-versus-host disease (GVHD). In 1956, his team also demonstrated that the curative effect of bone marrow is due to the engraftment of stem cells rather than humoral factors; a finding simultaneously shown by American and British scientists. In the succeeding years, his research group used purification techniques to study the morphological and phenotypical characteristics of hematopoietic stem cells. Medical applications developed under his leadership include: the use of purified stem cells for the treatment of infants with combined immune deficiency, the technique of T-cell depletion to prevent GVHD, and the treatment of intractable autoimmune diseases with autologous stem cell transplantation. In 1967, he also co-wrote the book Radiation Chimaeras, which helped define the practice of clinical bone marrow transplantation. Dr. van Bekkum is currently a Professor Emeritus at the University of Leiden and the Erasmus University of Rotterdam.