'Be a Committed Donor'

July 2, 2007 — -- Imagine being told that you have a chance at a winning ticket, not for a multimillion dollar jackpot but for a chance to save your own life.

In an seeming eternity of illness, Vinay Chakravarthy had a few brief moments when he almost grasped the fleeting edge of that hope -- before it was snatched away.

The 28-year-old medical resident from California, who is suffering from acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the blood and bone marrow, was told just three weeks ago that the National Marrow Donor Program registry had identified a potential donor for the life-saving procedure.

The match was described as a 10-in-10, or as close to genetically identical as possible. And the news gave Chakravarthy and his wife, Rashmi, a 26-year-old medical student, the first bit of hope since he had been readmitted to the hospital, his leukemia back after only two months in remission.

But the chance for a cure ebbed as quickly as it had swept into their lives. The donor, their transplant coordinator told them, was "unavailable."

There are 6 million people registered on the National Bone Marrow registry, but most minorities struggle to find a donor.

In 2006, only 480,000 donors were identified as African-American or black, while 415,000 Asians were registered and 580,000 on the list are Hispanic.

As a South Asian, Chakravarthy's odds of finding a match were estimated to be about 1 in 20,000 compared to 1 in 15 for a Caucasian.

In the past, recruitment to the bone marrow registry had focused on attracting the percentage of each ethnic group within the general population, according to Dr. Dennis Confer, chief medical officer of the National Marrow Donor Program.

"If you look at the population as a whole," Confer said, "Asians are only a small percentage of the population" in the United States.

In addition to the small number of donors that minorities have to pull from, they are often hamstrung by the genetic specificity required of donors.

Dr. David Cronin, a transplant physician, and Greenwall Faculty Scholar at Yale University, describes how donors are identified: "You try to get as close to being identical as you can. First it's identical twins, then siblings, then a parent because you have at least half their genetic material, and as you keep looking you keep extending your family. An Italian is more genetically identical to an Italian-American than an Irish-American."