Help Cancer Patients Find Bone Marrow Donors!

Our project is continuing to grow from year to year!  So far by May we raised more than in the previous years and were able to contribute almost $19,000 to the costs of bone marrow donor searches for 5 patients with blood cancers.  These five patients are all young people, majority of them are students.  Here is just one story of our most recently supported patient. 

Ilya is 35.  He is an engineer and lives in Ivanovo in central Russia. He loves rock music, nature, traveling around Russia and swimming.  Tinkering with computers and creating websites is another passion.  Until two years ago, Ilya was rarely ill.  And then a sudden pain in his spine caused him to start visiting doctors and then landed him in a hospital.   Upon examination, Ilya was diagnosed with chronic leukemia.  Although it can be treated, Ilya needed to undergo bone marrow transplant from a donor to prevent his disease from returning. 

Ilya has no siblings, and a search in the Russian donor database yielded no matches. His data was forwarded to the German registry where a matching donor was found in March 2017.  A month later, after additional chemotherapy helped Ilya achieve remission, the doctors transplanted him the donor's stem cells.  He is now recovering.  

For the last two years, Ilya was unable to work.  His savings are depleted, and his only close relative - his mom - has been retired for many years.  Without help from people like you, it would hardly be possible for Ilya to access the right treatment at the right time. Thanks you so much for your support for Ilya and patients like him!