No easy quest to find perfect match to save a life

WHAT if your life depended on the chance that a stranger living thousands of kilometres away might decide to make an anonymous gift to a person they didn’t know?

That’s the waiting game that blood cancer patients play every day as they hope a matching donor will join a stem cell registry somewhere in the world. And if a donor should do so, the patient has to hope that the right information systems are in place to enable them to secure the life-giving transplant.

A new initiative looks to make it easier and quicker for South African patients to find a match.

A South African non-profit, The Sunflower Fund, is joining with other registries to form the Stem Cell Registry Alliance (SCRA) to recruit donors of African descent around the globe and to share their information on a single platform.

Stem cell transplants are necessary for patients who suffer from blood diseases such as leukemia and lymphoma. A stem cell transplant gives patients new stem cells, which in turn produce healthy blood cells.

However, finding a matching donor isn’t as simple as having the same blood type. Since transplants are only possible between people with the same tissue type, patients are on the lookout for their genetic twin. And finding a match is not easy – the odds of a patient finding a donor are one in 100 000.

“Because patients are looking for a genetic match, ancestry plays a huge role in donor matching,” said Alana James, CEO of the Sunflower Fund. James said that South Africa’s diverse “rainbow nation” profile makes finding donors even more difficult.

“You need to find a donor who has the same proportion of mixed genes. Say if you’re a GermanNigerian, you need to find a German-Nigerian donor,” said James.

The SCRA brings together registries from across the continent of Africa, the UK and the Caribbean. The alliance’s goal is to connect patients of African descent, especially those in the African diaspora, with suitable donors.

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