|
| |
A marrow or blood cell transplant is a potentially life-saving treatment for patients with leukemia, lymphoma, and other blood diseases. A transplant replaces a patient's unhealthy blood cells with healthy blood-forming cells from a volunteer donor. Patients who do not have a suitably matching donor in their family may search the NMDP donor Registry for a donor. The three sources of blood-forming cells are marrow, blood-forming cells collected from the blood (called a PBSC donation) and umbilical cord blood.
Blood samples from adult donors or cord blood units are tested, and the tissue type is added to the NMDP Registry. Doctors can search this Registry when they need to find a donor whose tissue type matches their patient's.
Because tissue type is inherited, patients are most likely to match someone of their same race and ethnicity. There is a special need to recruit more donors who identify themselves as: Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, Hispanic or Latino.
Today, with millions of potential donors and tens of thousands of cord blood units on the Registry, the likelihood of finding an unrelated donor has increased dramatically for patients from all racial and ethnic groups.
Nevertheless, some patients are unable to find a match because of the rarity of their tissue types. Because tissue types are inherited, their most likely match is with someone from the same racial or ethnic group. That is why a pressing need remains for more people who identify themselves as American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, or multiple-race to volunteer as donors or to donate umbilical cord blood. |
| |
| We cooperate with National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) to register new marrow donors especially from Asian Pacific Islander (API) communities. In 2005, we registered over 2400 new marrow donors, far exceeding our goal. [Learn about NMDP] |
| |
|
|
