If you could offer hope to someone dying from cancer, would you?

Joining the Be The Match Registry® means volunteering to be listed as a potential blood stem cell donor, ready to save the life of any patient in need of a transplant.

You could be someone’s cure. You could literally save a life.

All that is required is a quick registration, a cheek swab, and dropping the return kit in the mail

Find out more & answer my questions about this!

The Whole U page on Be The Match

Why UW.
This is a bold, new partnership, but one with deep ties to the UW community.

Research and treatment done in collaboration between the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center and the UW—including one of the first live marrow transplants—was integral to the establishment of the first marrow registry. As the first institution to be a community supporter of Be The Match, the University of Washington is excited to continue to serve in this life-saving mission.

More recently, in May 2016, UW professor of sociology Alexes Harris was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer and soon learned that a marrow or stem cell transplant would be her only hope of a cure.

Two years later, after receiving a successful stem cell transplant using umbilical cord blood at Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, she is living cancer free and recovering well, but the difficulty of finding a donor with a 100% matched made her realize the fight had only just begun.

Why ancestry matters.

“We immediately started research to learn about how matches were found and I discovered that finding a non-related full match is difficult if you are a person of color, especially of mixed race origin,” says Harris, whose background is African American, Filipino, and Caucasian.

Having a 100% match is crucial in predicting positive outcomes post-transplant, but the percentage chance of finding a perfect match is skewed against minorities because ethnically diverse and mixed race donors are underrepresented in the registry.

While Caucasians have a 75% chance of finding a full match in the existing marrow registry, African Americans only have a 19% likelihood of finding a match and comprise only 7% of the United States registry.

Within the United States registry, the likelihood for finding a full match is higher for people of Mexican (37%), Chinese (41%), South Asian (33%), Hispanic Caribbean (40%) and Native American (52%) ancestry than for African Americans, but still significantly lower than the likelihood for Caucasians.

The good news, Harris says, is that there are tangible ways to make a real difference—here and now.

“When it comes to marrow donation, and other blood products and organ donation, we can make a difference,” Harris says. “We can, for ourselves, save ourselves.”