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- The first step to becoming a volunteer bone marrow donor is to join the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) Be The Match RegistrySM. To join, you complete a brief health questionnaire, sign a consent form and provide a small blood sample to determine your tissue type. At City of Hope, we ask that you donate a unit of blood or platelets to help offset the cost of a tissue-type test. Your tissue type is compared to the tissue types of thousands of patients awaiting a bone marrow transplant.
- If you are ever a potential match, City of Hope will notify you to see if you are still interested in continuing with the process. If you are, we will request an additional blood sample to determine if the donor matches well enough to continue with the process.
- If you are still considered to be a good potential match, you move to confirmatory testing. A donor coordinator contacts you to discuss what it means to be a possible match, answers any questions you might have and makes sure you are in good medical condition and eligible to be a donor. Additional blood testing is then scheduled.
- The additional tubes of blood are drawn from you and sent to the patient’s transplant center to be tested in conjunction with the patient’s blood. Results of the blood tests usually take about six weeks but can take several months.
- Once you have passed confirmatory testing, you progress to “workup,” the final stage of the matching process. A donor at “workup” has been identified as a match. The donor center contacts you, your family members, the medical director and the donor center coordinator to schedule an information session. This information session takes about an hour and a half during which you are scheduled for a physical exam to assure you are in good health and there are no special risks to you with the donation procedure. After signing the “Intent to Donate” agreement, the patient is told they have a matched stem cell donor and a target date is set for a transplant. The patient undergoes a pretransplant treatment of chemotherapy and/or radiation to kill diseased cells. Because the treatment also destroys the patient’s immune system, the potential recipient will most likely die if he or she does not receive a stem cell transplant.
- If you are asked to donate peripheral blood stem cells, you will receive injections of Filgrastim for four or five consecutive days. This drug increases the amount of stem cells released into the blood stream. After the series of injections are completed, the donor will donate peripheral blood stem cells through an apheresis procedure. The procedure itself will be performed at City of Hope or another NMDP Donor Center. During the apheresis procedure, the blood will be removed through a sterile needle placed in a vein in one arm and passed through an apheresis machine that separates out the blood stem cells. The remaining blood, minus the stem cells, is returned to you through a sterile needle placed in the other arm. The procedure can be a one or two day donation depending on the amount of stem cells required by the patient. Some side effects may be bone pain, muscle pain, nausea, insomnia, fatigue and headaches. Once the collection is complete, side effects should subside.
- If you are asked to donate bone marrow, you will undergo a surgical procedure under general or regional anesthesia. The marrow is collected from the rear of the pelvic bone using sterile needles and syringes. The entire procedure takes anywhere from one to two hours. You should recover quickly after the procedure and expect to have some aches and pains for several days or a few weeks. Your body will replenish its marrow within four to six weeks.
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The Be the Match Registry consists of nearly 4.5 million volunteer donors. Of the 4.5 million donors, only about 2 million are minorities including Hispanics, American Indians, African-Americans, Asians and persons of one or more ethnic or racial background. This means that minorities have a lesser chance of finding a bone marrow match. If more minorities became volunteer donors, it would create a more diverse registry by adding new tissue types that are currently not available and thereby increasing the chances of all patients in need of a bone marrow transplant to receive lifesaving cures. The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) maintains the Be The Match Registry -- the largest, most diverse marrow and blood stem cell registry in the world -- facilitating critically needed transplants for patients with leukemia and other life-threatening diseases across the country. Thirty percent of all patients who need a bone marrow transplant will find a suitable donor within his or her family. The other 70 percent of patients rely on unrelated volunteer donors from the Be The Match Registry. Beneficiaries are patients with life-threatening blood diseases such as leukemia, aplastic anemia, Hodgkin’s disease, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, and certain immune system and genetic disorders in need of matched donors for their transplants. By joiningNMDP's Be The Match Registry, you can save a life. At any given time, 3,000 critically ill people throughout the country and the world search the registry for a donor match – that match could be you. |
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