Chenin Iglowitz, a 35 year old nurse and sergeant in the U.S. Army, has been fighting Large B-cell Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. She has been through 2 courses of chemotherapy and is in desperate need of stem cell donors whom match her "HLA profile."
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Our urgent plea for Asian-Caucasian stem cell donors.
Mixed Asians or "Hapas" please take note! You may need this as much as we do.
If someone in your own family ever contracts Cancer, (God forbid), or even you yourself (for which you have about 40% lifetime odds according to the National Cancer Society), you will be very glad that you joined the “Be the Match” bone marrow database -and that you had encouraged others as well –for those same people may have saved your own life in doing so. It takes time to process these specimens, and, should you ever require a bone marrow, (stemcell), transplant yourself, you will wish you had encouraged everyone you knew to be tested before you needed it. Otherwise it might be too late!
You may need this very strong and effective treatment, and you will have had to find a matching donor in this very same donor database pool. At present, there are about 13 million pre-typed potential donors in the world-wide bone marrow database, but most of those are Caucasians. Asians and other races are dramatically under-represented. Mixed race individuals moreover represent only about 2% of that database. But the root of the problem –even in such a large pool- is that HLA typing exposes a huge variety of possible types, (think about mathematical powers of 10). The director of the NMDP, (the Chief Medical Officer of the National Marrow Donor Program, the largest search organization in the world), estimates that the possibility of a perfect match could conceivably be less than one divided by the total number of persons in the whole world, (i.e. 1 out of 4 billion or so)! He goes on to admit that it is somewhat better than that for genetic reasons, but it gets harder and harder for non-Caucasians and is especially so for mixed race recipients to find a match.
Our daughter Chenin-Blanc Iglowitz, age 35, is suffering from refractory, large B-cell Lymphoma, (Cancer), which has resisted two courses of intensive chemotherapy. She is in desperate need of a stem cell transplant which allows much higher doses, (5X), of chemotherapy and radiation and might save her life. The problem is that the donor must be an “HLA match”, (a special kind of tissue typing test procedure). The success of this kind of match for Chenin-Blanc is highly unlikely except with someone of mixed Asian (Sino-Asian, rather than Indo-Asian) and Caucasian descent as she is herself.
There is another advantage to using a matched donor know as the "graft vs. tumor" effect. Your cells are capable of seeing Chenin's tumor as an "alien"! Her own marrow has been tricked into thinking that it is "normal". Another name for this is "Cancer" itself! This is what it means.
