Your loved one needs a bone marrow match. Here is how to help find one.
When a family member is diagnosed and needs a transplant, every hour matters. Here are the concrete actions you can take — for them, and for thousands of others like them.
Free cheek swab • About 5 minutes • Routes you to your country’s registry
What you can do today
- Register yourself. A free cheek swab, about five minutes online. A sibling has roughly a 25% chance of matching, but most patients do not have a matched family donor, so most matches come from unrelated donors through the registry.
- Organize a drive for your loved one. A drive aimed at people who share the patient’s ethnic background can add dozens of new registry members in days. The patient’s transplant team can help coordinate it.
- Share their story. Patient-specific campaigns have helped find matches in cases where the existing registry pool did not already hold one.
Free cheek swab • About 5 minutes • Routes you to your country’s registry
Can family members match? The truth
The first hope for most families is a relative. Sometimes that works. More often it does not, and knowing the real odds early helps you act on the unrelated registry without losing time.
- Siblings: each full sibling has about a 25% chance of being a 10/10 match, because each child inherits one of two HLA sets from each parent. Most siblings are not matches.
- Parents: usually only a half-match (haploidentical) with their child, not a full match, though haploidentical transplants are viable when no other donor is found.
- Children: the same as parents — usually a half-match with their parent.
- Cousins: very rarely a full match. The probability is close to that of a random unrelated donor.
- More distant relatives: almost never a match. HLA inheritance means the odds fall off quickly outside the immediate family.
- Identical twins: always a perfect match, but used less often than you might expect, because the transplant lacks the graft-versus-tumor effect that helps clear remaining cancer cells.
The reality: according to HRSA, about 70% of patients do not have a fully matched donor in their family and rely on the unrelated registry. That is why registry size and diversity decide whether a given patient finds a donor at all.
The matching science behind these odds is explained by the National Cancer Institute and the Mayo Clinic, and the US donor program is run through the HRSA C.W. Bill Young Cell Transplantation Program.
Organizing a drive for your loved one
Why patient-specific drives work: a drive recruits new registry members from communities with HLA backgrounds similar to the patient’s. That raises the chance of a match for this patient and adds donors who may match future patients from the same communities.
How to start one:
- Ask your loved one’s transplant team to coordinate with the national registry (NMDP in the US).
- The national registry supports patient-specific drives and provides the materials.
- Use social media and community networks to recruit people to register at the drive.
- Hold the drive at a school, place of worship, community center, or workplace.
- Set a clear date, time, and place, and ask a few reliable people to help run the table so you are not doing it alone.
- Write a short script for volunteers covering who the drive is for, the age and health criteria for joining, and that registering is a free cheek swab, so everyone gives the same accurate information.
- Follow up afterward with a thank-you and the registry sign-up link, so people who could not attend can still join from home.
A practical note on expectations: a drive that signs up many people may still not produce a direct match for your family member, because matching depends on HLA type rather than effort. Every person who joins, though, becomes searchable for this patient and for others, so the work is rarely wasted even when the immediate result is not the one you hoped for.
The Jada Bascom Foundation supports drives in our community. Reach us through our contact page for help with drives in the Pacific Northwest, where we operate. We can help with logistics, materials, and amplification.
Learn more about registration drives and how they are run.
Common transplant diagnoses
These are some of the conditions most often treated with a bone marrow transplant. For clinical detail and treatment options, the specialist centers linked below are the authoritative sources; the patient’s own transplant team guides every decision.
Leukemia (AML, ALL, CML)
Transplant is used for several leukemia types, especially when chemotherapy alone is not enough. Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) is one of the most common transplant indications, and Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) often affects children, treated at pediatric transplant centers such as St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.
Lymphoma (Hodgkin, Non-Hodgkin)
Transplant may be used after a relapse or for aggressive variants. Both autologous (using the patient’s own cells) and allogeneic (using a donor) approaches exist, as Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center describes.
Sickle Cell Disease
A bone marrow transplant is one of the few potentially curative options for sickle cell disease, and pediatric outcomes have improved substantially over the past decade. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital cover it in depth.
Aplastic Anemia
Severe aplastic anemia is one of the conditions where a transplant is most effective. The Dana-Farber stem cell transplant program describes how it is used.
Other conditions
Bone marrow transplants are also used for Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID), Myelodysplastic Syndromes (MDS), and a range of inherited blood disorders. The National Cancer Institute maintains an overview of the conditions treated this way.
Supporting your loved one through transplant
The process is long. Conditioning chemotherapy, the transplant itself, and early recovery can mean weeks to months in or near a hospital, followed by a long stretch of ongoing care. Planning for that length of time helps.
Graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) is a real risk even after a well-matched transplant. Setbacks happen, and the transplant team manages GVHD with medication and supportive care.
The load on caregivers is significant. Available support resources include the American Cancer Society, NMDP’s patient-support resources at nmdp.org, and the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. These are listed as resources that exist, not as endorsements.
Practical help is often the most useful. Transplant frequently means weeks near a treatment center, so coordinating lodging, transport, meals, and time off work is part of the support a family provides. Many transplant programs have social workers and patient navigators whose role is to help with exactly these logistics, and asking the care team early about what assistance is available can save time later.
Share the work where you can. Caregiving is hard to sustain alone over a process that can run for months. Some families keep a simple shared calendar or a sign-up list so that friends and relatives can take on specific tasks, such as a hospital visit, a grocery run, or childcare, rather than asking the primary caregiver to carry everything.
Frequently asked questions
What to do now
- Register yourself first: How to find your bone marrow registry
- Why diversity matters for matching: Why donors of color are urgently needed
- Read Torsten and Jada’s story: How one unrelated donor changed everything
- Comparing your options: Which registry should you join?
The fastest thing you can do right now is add yourself to the registry. You might be the match your loved one needs, or the match for someone else’s. It is free and takes about five minutes.
Free cheek swab • About 5 minutes • Routes you to your country’s registry