How your gift saves lives

Every gift you give, regardless of the size, provides patients hope, along with support, resources, information, counseling and grants. It also allows those who are experiencing the loneliest season of their life to be surrounded by people committed to their care.

We advocate, securing legislative victories so patients can have better financial coverage for treatment. We study treatment outcomes, pursuing clinical trials that will create options for treatment where there once were none. We help patients navigate, offering encouragement, comfort and hope as they recover from transplant.

Your gift fuels these limitless opportunities for good that ensure every patient can look forward to the future—and the chance for a cure.

Finding a suitably matched donor is critical—but it’s not the only challenge patients face. Financial costs continue to be the No. 1 burden or barrier reported by patients who come to us for transplant. Even if the procedure is covered by insurance, the cost of medications, copays, temporary housing and transportation stack up over time as patients work to heal.

For the 18,000 people each year diagnosed with a cancer or blood disorder that can be treated or cured with a blood stem cell transplant, these costs can feel insurmountable. Your gift helps fund grants for patients who are struggling to pay the many out-of-pocket medical costs. The result? They can focus on moving through transplant and getting healthy during recovery.

Your support makes life-changing research programs, like those below, possible.

• The NMDP Amy Strelzer Manasevit Research Program sponsors early-career researchers who are finding innovative solutions to the complications that can arise after transplant.
• The NMDP Barbara Buchbinder Nurse Research Program funds research that provides better outcomes for children with cancer. These discoveries will help patients live longer, healthier lives.

Philanthropic gifts like yours also help us conduct other critical research that unlocks access to treatment for more patients. Matching donors and patients depends on genes called HLA, or human leukocyte antigens. Traditionally, the best transplant outcomes happen when the HLA type of a donor closely matches those of a patient. Usually, doctors want to match at least eight out of 12 HLA markers, while some want to match 10.

The NMDP Donor for All initiative, though, is changing this thinking by showing that patients can have a successful transplant using a partially matched (7 of 8) donor—allowing us to expand access to treatment to more patients. This will significantly increase the odds of finding a suitably matched available donor, especially for patients with diverse ancestry, who often face greater difficulties in finding a fully matched donor.

Because matching has a genetic component, patients are most likely to match a donor who shares their ethnic background. Ethnically diverse donors, though, are underrepresented on the NMDP Registry^SM—despite it being the most diverse listing of potential donors in the world. More people of all backgrounds are needed to sign up to be donors so patients have a greater chance of finding a match.

Your gift can help our recruitment efforts by reaching new communities and adding more young and ethnically diverse potential donors to the registry.