Ann: AGM Presentations, page-19

“MEND was over half-way enrolled at one point too, wasn't it? Apparently. With 24 candidates total (12 placebo) how does it make sense to blame the hospitals...........after they had just expanded into other larger hospitals?”

It’s not the fault of the hospitals that recruitment couldn’t be completed. Rather, it was a complete structural failure of the public hospital sector ICU system. For evidence of this, feel free to Google and click on one of the 50+ articles since September ‘21 when a code brown was declared in Victoria alone.

For the MEND trial, there was no way this could be avoided as:

1. The private system was basically shut down, so inaccessible.
2. The healthcare system has lost net thousands of workers, mainly in the ICU area, since the onset of covid, so there was simply no way to complete the required admin of a clinical trial while also providing a reasonable standard of care for other patients.

However, some lessons can be applied to the GvHD trial, namely:

1. Recruit from medical centres that segregate ICU staff from cancer (and GvHD) staff. This will reduce the staffing burden if covid continues causing a strain on icu departments.
2. Recruit from centres that have demonstrated they can recruit GvHD patients for clinical trials in the past (thankfully the m company have a long list for Cynata to peruse, as well as our 4 centres in the UK).