Join the Database!!

The mission of the Ahepa Marrow Donor Registry is to add persons of Mediterranean descent into our database of prospective donors. The best chance for a leukemia patient is from a family member. Secondly, from relatives, and then from their ethnic group.

The chances of finding an unrelated (allogeneic) match are 20,000 to 1. We must add to our database so that any Greek patient has a realistic chance of finding a match.

Since April 2006, we've added 3,000 donors to the Registry. And we're already doing good things. More than 4000 patients around the world have searched our database since then, and three of our donors have been asked to "be at the ready" for a donation (cancer patients have to be "healthy" enough to receive the transplant).

But we still have significant challenges before us. The truth is that we are at a very critical point for the Registry. Awareness is building, but some members of our Greek American community are hesitant to get tested. They don’t know that tremendous strides have been made in marrow transplants and that, today, it is much easier to be a donor. You don’t necessarily have to go under anesthesia and have marrow extracted from your hip; now, blood stem cells can easily be removed from your blood with minimal risk. It's an outpatient procedure, most often. Mothers-to-be can also choose to donate the umbilical cord blood that is otherwise discarded as medical waste when their babies are born.