Urgent Need for Minority Marrow Donors
Dana-Farber encourages people to become bone marrow donors during November's National Marrow Awareness Month

BOSTON- Orlando has leukemia. Lynette, lymphoma. The only hope for these children, along with thousands of other children and adults who have certain cancers and blood disorders, is an exact bone marrow donor match to give them a second chance at life.
The need for bone marrow and blood stem cell donors is great, but the need for minority donors is urgent.
November is National Marrow Awareness month, and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is encouraging people to help save lives by registering to be a potential donor. A special need exists for participation of people with minority ethnic backgrounds. Because these donors comprise only 26 percent of the national registry, patients with minority ethnic backgrounds are less likely than Caucasians to find a matched donor.
"Finding a compatible donor is always a challenge, and certain tissue traits of the donor and the patient must match," explains Joseph H. Antin M.D., chief of the Stem Cell Transplantation Service and medical director of the unrelated donor program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. "The best potential donor most likely comes from the patient's same racial/ethnic group, and many minority groups are under-represented in the national registry. More donors of diverse race and ethnicity increase the opportunity that all people will have an equal chance of finding a matched donor."
Joining the national registry is a simple process and requires only a small blood test, but becoming a volunteer donor is a serious commitment. Those who join the registry are asked to remain committed to donating for any patient, anywhere in the
world, regardless of the patient's sex, age, race or ethnicity until their 61st birthday. This commitment can mean the difference between life and death for the patient.

Every 21 minutes, someone in the United States is diagnosed with a medical condition such as leukemia, lymphoma, or a disorder like sickle cell anemia that requires treatment with a stem cell transplant. Nearly 70 percent of these patients must rely on an unrelated donor for their transplants.
Dana-Farber's Stem Cell Transplantation Program offers these patients hope through a number of treatments, including marrow grafting from family members or unrelated donors and blood stem cell transplants.
A National Marrow Donor Program Center, Dana-Farber established its Stem Cell Transplantation Program in the early 1970s, making it one of the first such programs in the world. The program is now one of the largest and busiest in the United States, and the second largest for unrelated donor transplants in the world. The program performs more than 350 transplants annually and has performed more than 4,000 transplants since its inception.
To find out more about Dana-Farber's Stem Cell Transplantation Program and how to become a potential donor, please call 866-875-3324, email nmdpdonor@dfci.harvard.edu, or visit online at www.dana-farber.org/how/donatebone.
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute is a principal teaching affiliate of Harvard Medical School, a federally designated Center for AIDS Research, and a founding member of the Dana-Farber/Harvard Cancer Center, a federally designated comprehensive cancer center.

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