The NMDP facilitates unrelated marrow and cord blood transplants as a single point of access for a long-standing collaborative network of national and international leading medical facilities in marrow and cord blood transplantation. The NMDP connects patients, doctors, donors and researchers to the resources they need to help more people live longer and healthier lives. 

The Welsh Bone Marrow Donor Registry is a panel of blood donors who have volunteered to have the white cells in their blood "tissue typed". The panel is searched every day to try and find donors whose tissue type is a close match to patients who need life saving bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cell transplants.

Bone marrow is where blood cells are formed. Healthy people have a reserve of marrow which is constantly being renewed but patients with some blood disorders don't have these reserves. Sometimes the only treatment is a transplant of healthy bone marrow or stem cells from a well-matched donor. If the transplant is successful the patient's bone marrow starts to produce new, healthy blood cells.

In October 1994, the Tzu Chi Bone Marrow Donor Registry was established. By August 1996, the registry had collected data on over 127,000 volunteer donors. It's over 200,000 by the end of 2002. It has become the largest marrow donor registry in Asia and the fifth largest data bank in the world. It immensely increases the probability of type matching and the hope of survival for victims of blood diseases.

WMDA (World Marrow Donor Association) is a voluntary organisation of representatives of blood stem cell donor registries, cord blood banks, other organisations and individuals, with an interest in hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. It provides a forum for mutual discussion of all issues regarding the clinical use of hematopoietic stem cells from unrelated donors across international boundaries. These discussions, which take place in working groups, make it possible to formulate guidelines on for example logistics, quality control, accreditation, ethcis, finances and information technology. - (Read more)

The Caitlin Raymond International Registry (CRIR), a pioneer in the establishment of procedures and practices for stem cell donor search, is the oldest coordinating center for bone marrow, peripheral blood stem cell and placental cord unit search in the United States. Affiliations with more than 90 international registries and cord blood banks in 43 countries enables us to access nearly 6,400,000 donors and more than 200,000 cord blood units.

CRIR is a non profit organization of the UMass Memorial Medical Center in Massachusetts. - (Read more)

A bone marrow, stem cell or cord blood transplant is an overwhelming experience – physically, emotionally, logistically and financially – both for patients and for their families.

The Bone Marrow Foundation was founded in 1992 with a single vital goal: to improve the quality of life for children and adults who are undergoing transplantation as a life saving treatment for leukemia, Hodgkin's and non-Hodgkin's lymphomas, multiple myeloma, aplastic anemia, severe combined immunodeficiency, neuroblastoma and many other cancers and genetic disorders. The Foundation is the only organization of its kind that does not limit assistance to a specific disease, type of transplant or age range. All of the foundation’s services are offered free to patients and their families.

The nbmtLINK is a non-profit organization specifically serving stem cell transplant (SCT) patients, their caregivers, families, and health professionals. In 1992, the nbmtLINK was founded by those who had experienced the gap in information and support services for SCT patients and were inspired to establish an organization dedicated to meet these needs. - (Read more)

BMDW is a voluntary collaborative effort of stem cell donor registries and cord blood banks whose goal is to provide centralised information on the HLA phenotypes and other relevant data of unrelated stem cell donors and cord blood units and to make this information easily accessible to the physicians of patients in need of a hematopoietic stem cell transplant. - (Read more)

Turning on adult stem cells may help repair bone

Hindu.com (Jan 27,2008) Potential new approach to treating osteoporosis, other degenerative conditions. The use of a drug to activate stem cells that differentiate into bone appears to cause regeneration of bone tissue and be may be a potential treatment strategy for osteoporosis, according to a report in the February 2008 Journal of Clinical Investigation.

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