AABB Annual Meeting 2026

The AABB Annual Meeting is the yearly scientific and educational conference of AABB, formerly the American Association of Blood Banks and now the Association for the Advancement of Blood & Biotherapies, the accrediting and standards-setting body for blood banks and transfusion services. It combines plenary science, oral and poster abstracts, and a commercial exhibition spanning transfusion medicine, cellular therapies and biotherapies. Attendance runs around 3,600 from across the world.

For a cold chain professional, blood banking is a temperature-controlled discipline in itself: red cells held at 1-6C, platelets at 20-24C, plasma frozen, all governed by AABB Standards enforced through accreditation. The meeting is where those storage, transport, validation and monitoring requirements are discussed and revised, and where storage-equipment and temperature-monitoring vendors show product. It is a practical read on the regulatory direction of blood and cell-therapy cold chains.

The room is transfusion medicine physicians, blood bank and transfusion service directors, medical technologists, cell-therapy and biotherapies staff, and quality and regulatory personnel, alongside blood centre operations leaders. Exhibitors include blood collection, cold storage and temperature-monitoring suppliers. The audience skews clinical and laboratory rather than logistics, though supply and distribution roles attend.