To date, the SABMR has helped save the lives of 550 patients with life-threatening blood disorders by matching them with healthy, unrelated bone marrow donors from South Africa and the rest of the world.
Bone marrow-related diseases are not a mystery but a solvable challenge says Dr Charlotte Ingram, medical director for the SAMBR.
“However, there are however many patients in need of stem cell transplant to offer them the best chance of survival. The solution: we must get everyone in the world on a registry to give them the best chance. Starting in South Africa," she says.
Currently, there are 39 million registered donors worldwide and counting. Ethnicity plays a vital role in finding a donor as you’re most likely to find a donor within your own ethnic grouping.
South Africa is a prime and unique example of mixed inherited diversity, making it even more difficult to find a suitable match for a patient in need.
A patient has a 1 in 100 000 chance of finding a suitable donor match.
These odds are even further reduced for patients of colour to 1 in 400 000 as there is a lack of donors of colour not only on our local registry, but globally.
Hence, spurring everyone who is eligible to sign up and donate to give patients the second chance at life they so deserve.
As a non-profit public benefit organisation, the SABMR relies heavily on financial donations to cover the costs of donor recruitment which costs around R2000 per swab test kit.
Each kit needs to be sent to an international laboratory for tissue-typing before the results are placed on the SABMR’s database, to which donor registries around the world have access.
