Be The Match, a national nonprofit organization that is dedicated to saving the lives of patients with blood diseases, is working to get students on campus involved with their work.
By facilitating blood stem cell transplants, Be The Match helps treat patients with these diseases if they want an alternative treatment option to chemotherapy and radiation therapy.
“We fight blood cancer and blood diseases, and we do that by facilitating blood stem cell and marrow transplants for patients with blood cancers and blood disorders” said Kelly Humphrey, Account Manager of Be The Match.
“70% of the time patients don’t have a matching donor in their family. So, they rely on us to find an unrelated donor to be a treatment option.”
Radiation and chemotherapies, which weaken the body’s immune system, limit patients’ ability to make their own stem cells. Stem cell and bone marrow transplants aid the patient through their recoveries from these treatments and make them feel more comfortable.
About 90% of the time, donors will donate PBSC (Peripheral Blood Stem Cells), similarly to how one would donate platelets or plasma. The other 10% of the time, they will be asked to do a bone marrow transplant.
One limitation that the organization seems to be facing is the fact that they are not yet as ethnically diverse as they would like to be.
“Because of the under-representation on the registry of various backgrounds, we need more diversity. If you’re black and you need a stem cell transplant, you only have a 29% chance of finding a match on the registry. If you’re white, you have a 79% chance. That is a pretty big gap.” said Humphrey,
“That’s why we continuously try to register more people and as many people as we can. But there’s a key focus on diversity.”
Ideal stem cell donors are between the ages of 18 and 32 years old. Young individuals are preferred because they are less likely to have diseases, and their bodies produce more stem cells compared to older individuals.
“College students are right in that age range that we want to work with. So, I reached out to the University of Wyoming to see what options there were [for students to get involved],” said Humphrey.
“We have had a few people express interest in starting a chapter of our collegiate program on campus, and we want to get one started at the University of Wyoming.”
Other organizations at UW are finding various ways to get involved, such as the Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) Fraternity hosting a donation event on March 29th.
Humphrey noted that students who are interested in getting involved have a number of ways to do so.
“They could host their own drive as a group, they can volunteer, they can order a swab your circle, which is basically five kits that I send to them in the mail so that they can swab their friends or family” said Humphrey,
“They can get involved in our legislative efforts if that’s of interest to them. If they need volunteer hours, we can give them that. I think that’s a good overview of different ways to get involved.”
