The recent 58th Annual American Society of Haematology (ASH) meeting held in San Diego shed light on the usual mixture of groundbreaking basic and translational science and the recent practice-changing clinical trials. Recurrent themes this year were the use of recent next-generation sequencing (NGS) techniques to perfect prognostic stratification and disease monitoring. Newer prospects on the role of metabolism in normal and malignant haemopoiesis and mature data on long-awaited trials on immunotherapy and CAR-T cells in lymphoid neoplasms were also discussed.