Is there a matching donor for every patient who needs a bone marrow transplant?
Over 5,000 patients have been given the gift of life through The Anthony Nolan Trust’s Register. However, even with over twelve million donors on registers worldwide, a bone marrow match is not always available. Some patients have rare tissue-types that may be very difficult to match. In these instances, even with everyone’s best efforts, we are sometimes unsuccessful in identifying a donor. It is for this reason that we urgently need to increase the size and diversity of our register. At any one time, there are approximately 120,000 patients throughout the world needing to find a suitable bone marrow donor. The Anthony Nolan Trust alone receives over 16,000 search requests in a year. Therefore we have an urgent need to recruit more donors to increase their chance of receiving a transplant.
