Without much thought, Elyse Allen registered her DNA two years ago at a bone marrow drive. Over the summer, a donor registry notified her that her blood stem cells were the only known match in the world for a 7-year-old boy who has leukemia.
"Two months ago, I get a call telling me that I'm a possible match," Allen said. "I said, 'For what?' They said, 'Bone marrow....' I agreed in a second. I had no questions."
Even though she will not get to meet the boy for at least a year, the 37-year-old elementary school teacher from West Los Angeles gave her bone marrow recently at the City of Hope cancer center in Duarte.
During a 30-minute procedure while Allen was under anesthesia, doctors inserted two needles into spots on her upper hip and drew out the marrow. By early evening, she was resting at her mother's house with nothing worse than a slightly sore back.
Allen is one of 1,000 people who have donated their marrow as part of the nonprofit Gift of Life program operated by an organization based in Boca Raton, Fla., and founded in 1991 to recruit more donors of Jewish descent.
The chances of matching patients and donors is greatly improved when searchers focus on people with the same ancestral background.
Although the number of registered donors has increased over the years, it is still harder for African Americans, Asians, Latinos and Native Americans to find donors than it is for whites.
But even for whites there's a need for heterogeneity. Jews have an especially difficult time finding matches because the Holocaust severed bloodlines and drastically reduced the number of potential donors, said Jay Feinberg, executive director of Gift of Life.
"As a transplant recipient, I can speak from a patient's perspective," said Feinberg, who was saved by a 1995 transplant after being diagnosed with leukemia four years earlier. "The best way to describe it is, Elyse is a hero."
Feinberg said that registering is quick and easy. A volunteer swabs the inside of a person's mouth to gather DNA information. Those cells are then analyzed to determine the donor's tissue type and entered into a database of 75,000 names. Some other registries prick a person's finger to attain tissue information.
Bone marrow is the starting point for blood production. If infused into a sick person's body after chemotherapy, it can essentially trick the patient's body into producing healthy blood cells again.
