National Bone Marrow Registry is Seeking Donors
AP
Published: October 13, 1987
ST. PAUL, Oct. 12— Eight years after a Colorado girl received the first transplant of bone marrow from an unrelated donor, the first nationwide computer network for such transplants has been established at the University of Minnesota.
The network, the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry, is trying to recruit 67,000 potential bone marrow donors from 50 blood centers nationwide and pool information on them, said Dr. David Stroncek, medical director of the registry's coordinating center.
Information on potential recipients from 12 participating transplant centers across the country will be entered into a computer for possible matches, he said in a recent interview.
''With the time it saves, it's going to save lives,'' said Sherry Graves of Fort Collins, Colo., whose daughter, Laura, underwent the world's first successful bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor in 1979. ''You're just lost unless you can find a suitable donor.''
The girl received the transplant at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle after a three-month search for a donor, but she died after a recurrence of her leukemia in 1981, her mother said.
The national registry is intended to help the people - about 60 percent of potential recipients - who cannot find a suitable donor within their own families, Dr. Stroncek said.People who need bone marrow transplants must find donors whose matching human leukocyte antigens, substances on the surface of their white blood cells, match their own. There are several basic antigen groupings which make matching bone marrow more difficult than matching blood types.
Once matched with a recipient following a battery of tests, the potential donor will be hospitalized and placed under general anesthesia so marrow can be extracted from the pelvis. The extraction process takes less than an hour, but the donor stays in the hospital one night for observation.
Bone marrow transplants help people suffering from leukemia, a blood cancer, as well as aplastic anemia and other diseases by replacing their cancerous blood cells or giving them new blood cells. Medical experts say the chances are about 1 in 20,000 of any two people matching.
The national registry, which began operating last month, hopes to make its first match soon. It is the first nationwide computer network, although there have been computerized donor networks in several regions of the country.
The registry is the latest development in a national trend toward better organization in matching organ donors and recipients.
On Oct. 1, the United Network for Organ Sharing, a transplant umbrella group, began requiring the nation's 200 transplant centers to share certain kidneys. The requirement is a step toward possible nationwide sharing of all organs.
''It's been mostly that each center had their own source of donors, so for these poor patients to get at all of these donors, they had to contact six or seven transplant centers and have each transplant center search its own little pool,'' Dr. Stroncek said. ''It's been very frustrating for these families.
''The problem is these diseases progress and they only have a limited amount of time to do the transplant, so if it drags out too long the person will die,'' he said.
Ms. Graves said that after her daughter's death, her husband, Robert, handled his grief by trying to help others find donors. The agonizing searches he undertook, often unsuccessful, led him to testify before Congress on the need for a better system.
The registry, financed with a three-year, $3.5 million grant from the Federal Government, is a collaborative effort of the American Red Cross, the American Association of Blood Banks and the Council of Community Centers, and is run by the St. Paul Red Cross Regional Blood Service.
The registry will use past donors as recruiters. ''We have donors regularly come and talk to people and they say what a great thing it was and that they're glad they did it,'' said Dr. Stroncek.