Why do you need more donors and who can become a donor?

Why do you need more donors and who can become a donor?

Paul Travers (Deputy Director of Research) gives expert video advice on: What is bone marrow?; Who needs a bone marrow transplant?; Why do you need more donors and who can become a donor? and more...

The compelling need for more donors for the register is that you have to match the tissue type between the donor and the patient, because if you don't do that then the patient is likely to die from a disease where the immune system of the donated cells reacts against the patient and can kill the patient. So you need to get the matching. And genes that you match for are variable within the population and they act as if like unique identifiers for individuals within the population. So, your chances of finding a matching donor are actually quite low and it could be one in 10,000, one in 100,000 individuals in the population have the potential to act as a donor for any particular patient in need. So that means you need a large pool of donors. It becomes like a lottery and you've got a small chance of finding a matching donor. So, you just need more potential donors to make your chances of getting a winning ticket in that lottery greater. At the moment, we have somewhere in the region of 400,000 donors, there's a bit less than that in the Anthony Nolan Trust register. And we're still having patients for whom we don't find matching donors. So, we need to find more donors. We need to have more people who are prepared to make that commitment to help potentially save somebody's life.