More Potential Donors Needed to Save Leukemia Patients' Lives

China's Marrow Donor Program has facilitated a total of 2000 volunteers to donate their stem cells for transplants. Given the 60-percent cure rate, it means 1,200 lives have been saved. But each year, there are 40-thousand new leukemia cases diagnosed in the country. It means we need more potential donors willing to give those patients a second chance at life.

Our Wu Jia has more.

Since its inception in 2001, the China Marrow Donor Program Registry has grown steadily to more than 1 million potential donors.

As the world's largest Chinese bone marrow data bank, it has helped nearly 20-thousand patients search for the best possible match for a transplant.

But as the match rate among non-relatives is one in 10,000, Wang Wei, Executive Vice President of the Red Cross Society of China, says demand still outweighs supply.

"There are currently 1 million patients waiting for a transplant. That means the number of our potential donors is still not enough."

For many years, people have turned their backs on stem cell donation because they believe it is a dangerous surgical process.

But clinical advances have now made donating stem cells a more convenient non-surgical procedure. So far, there have not been any critical cases reported worldwide as a result of stem cell donation.

Dang Chunli, the 2000th donor facilitated by China Marrow Donor Program, appeals to everyone to get started by getting on one of the Red Cross blood donation buses and giving a 10-milliliter blood sample and a signature to join the registry.

"I would like to thank those staffers of the Red Cross Society of China. They were really caring to me through the whole donating process. Because of their hard work, our dream of saving others' lives became true. So, it is not just my own effort, it is a teamwork that keeps the whole process rolling."

Red Cross Executive Vice President Wang Wei says the expansion of the registry requires help from the whole society.

"We sincerely hope that government officials and the public will continue to support the building of our registry and the press can provide more in-depth reports on the humanitarian spirit of those donors and inform the public with more knowledge about stem cell donation."

To save the lives of millions of patients for whom a transplant might be the best and only treatment option, the China Marrow Donor Program is trying to expand its registry to two million potential donors by 2015.

For CRI, I'm Wu Jia.