Help Cancer Patients Find Bone Marrow Donors!

As we are entering the season of joy, we would like to send our best holiday wishes to our friends around the world who have made our project such a success.  This year our project had crossed $100,000 mark in donations!  Since inception, we have helped 52 patients with paying for donor searches in foreign registries.  These are the 52 lives that were made better by your generosity and kindness. 

I wish I could say we are close to the victory.  However, there is still no progress in growing a registry of native donors in Russia, and the government still denies paying for the donor searches in other countries.  Therefore, it falls to us to help the patients get their health back. 

If you can donate to our project this month, we may be able to win prizes during a month-long Holiday challenge.  Ten best projects will get extra bonuses for the most number of donors and largest amounts raised.  We will very much appreciate your support, as there are still dozens of patients whose lives are at risk due to lack of money. 

Here is one story.  Elena is a 14-year old from a city of Abakan in Siberia. She is a good student and she loves to cook.  When she grows up Elena hopes to become a chef in her own restaurant.  But to achieve her dream, she needs to beat her illness first.  In February 2014 Elena started feeling unwell and her lymph nodes enlarged.  Turned out that she had a rare type of leukemia, which can only be overcome by bone marrow transplant from a donor.  Since Elena has no match in her family, she needs to find one in registries abroad.  Her mom left her job to care for Elena, and her grandparents are retired.  They need our help to be able to pay for the donor search.  Please help Elena and others like her!

Many thanks from everyone in our team!  Have a great New Year!

The latest beneficiaries of your support are two young women, Oksana and Marina.   Oksana is a student from Samara region.  She was initially diagnosed with lymphoma back in 2011.  The treatment eventually brought her into remission, but unfortunately, it only lasted 9 months.  Since then Oksana went through more chemotherapy and transplantation of her own stem cells, but her disease continued to progress.  Now she needs even more difficult treatment - transplant from an unrelated donor, as there is no matching donor in Oksana's family.  Thanks to the extra funds raised during Bonus day in July, we were able to forward 10,000 euros for Oksana's donor search. 

Marina has a very similar story.  She too had a particularly aggressive lymphoma that did not respond well to treatment and recurred several times.  This year she began therapy with a new drug that helped bring her disease under control, and that allowed her to begin considering transplant from a donor to help sustain the results of treatment.  A donor was found in the US, and we hope Marina will proceed to transplantation soon. 

We are very grateful to everyone who has helped these young ladies and many other patients since this project started.   Please consider supporting us again on Wednesday, October 15th, the last Bonus day of the year.  Once again, we will get 30% match on all donations up to $1000, and we have a chance to win additional bonuses - for the most funds raised, as well as for the most participants.  Donate early - the contest starts at 9 am EDT (17:00 Moscow time). 

Thank you for everything you do!