Be The Match: Swab4Loudoun

When their 10-year-old daughter Laura was diagnosed with leukemia, Robert Graves, D.V.M., and his wife Sherry were ready to do anything they could to save her. Desperate to save her life, they turned to alternative treatment options. They agreed to try the first ever bone marrow transplant for a leukemia patient from an unrelated donor. Laura received her transplant in 1979. And it worked. The success of the treatment inspired the Graves to give other families the same hope for a cure. Thanks to Dr. Graves, other patient families, doctors, congressional support and funding from the U.S. Navy, a national registry of volunteers willing to donate bone marrow was born.

Many people wondered who would step forward to donate marrow. Within the first year the National Bone Marrow Donor Registry (as we were called then) was established, an astonishing 10,000 people answered the call. We conducted our first transplant as the National Marrow Donor Program® in 1987 when Diane Walters of Wisconsin donated marrow to 6-year-old Brooke Ward of North Carolina. It wasn’t long before the program took off worldwide from a tiny office at the American Red Cross in St. Paul, Minn.

We have facilitated more than 100,000 blood stem cell transplants, and 6,426 transplants last year to give patients hope for a future. As the recognized leader in unrelated marrow transplantation, Be The Match continues to develop services and interactive technologies used by transplant experts around the world to reach more patients.

For the thousands of people diagnosed every year with life-threatening blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma, a cure exists. Over the past 30 years Be The Match ® , operated by the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), has managed the largest and most diverse marrow registry in the world. We work every day to save lives through transplant. Patients depend on Be The Match and our supporters to find a match to save their life. We are here to provide one-on-one support to patients and their families every step of the way along the transplant journey.

Our never-ending passion and dedication to save lives through transplant are what drive us to help more patients survive. For patients diagnosed with leukemia, lymphoma and other life-threatening diseases, a bone marrow or cord blood transplant may be their best or only hope for a cure. Yet 70% of patients who need a transplant to do not have a fully matched donor in their family. They depend on Be The Match® and our supporters to find a match to save their life. We also provide one-on-one support to patients and their families throughout the transplant journey.

Our dedication to research has had a significant impact on blood cancer survival and other diseases, and improving the quality of life for thousands of transplant patients. We are relentless in our search to find answers that will lead to better donor matching, more timely transplants, and treatment of even more blood diseases through transplant. With more than 1,400 research publications, our research program Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Program (CIBMTR)® is an extraordinary collaborative global effort to never give up on helping more patients survive and thrive.