The National Marrow Donor Program: improving access to hematopoietic cell transplantation

Abstract

Since its founding in 1986, the NMDP has grown into a large international organization, providing patients with access to more than 9.5 million adult donors on the Be The Match Registry and to more than 18.5 million adult donors worldwide. Patients searching through the NMDP also have access to nearly 165,000 CBUs from NMDP-affiliated cord blood banks and nearly 600,000 CBUs worldwide. Through aggressive recruitment to the Be The Match Registry, and by establishing connections to international registries, the NMDP gives patients in need of a transplant access to a large and diverse pool of unrelated donors and CBUs. This has resulted in a steady increase in the likelihood of finding a matching donor or CBU for searching patients of all races/ethnicities. The NMDP has also developed programs and initiatives that have successfully increased the efficiency of the search process, which has decreased the time to transplant. The NMDP has also developed strategies that have improved access to transplant, especially among minority racial/ethnic patient populations. These long-standing and ongoing efforts to grow the Be The Match Registry and to improve the search process resulted in a record number of NMDP-facilitated transplants in 2011--more than 5,500--and now have facilitated more than 50,000 transplants since 1986. However, the NMDP, using SEER data, has calculated that there are approximately 10,000 patients in the U.S. each year who could potentially benefit from unrelated donor HCT. The NMDP has therefore set a goal to facilitate 10,000 transplants annually. Although meeting this goal will require nearly doubling the annual rate of transplants, the NMDP is confident that it has the expertise, personnel, facilities, and commitment to achieve this goal.