Adam Pankalla, VFMP 2014
This year, UBC medical students founded the club “Medical Students for Stem Cell Networks” with the goal of organizing cheek swab drives and improving the Canadian stem cell donor registry. These registries are used to help find potential bone marrow donors for the 75% of patients who will be unable to find a match within their family. Such a system relies on thousands of individuals who have agreed to have their HLA type analyzed (usually through the collection of a cheek swab) and included in the database. If a patient is able to correctly match to a donor in the registry, bone marrow transplants can be used to treat a variety of diseases and conditions including leukemias, lymphomas, and aplastic anemia.
Our club established a long-term partnership with OneMatch, a division of the Canadian Blood Services, to provide the swab kits and support we needed to operate. Since young, multiethnic males are most dramatically under-represented on the current Canadian stem cell donor registy, we decided to target university campuses for our drives. Partnering with several university clubs (including Hillel of Greater Vancouver) enabled us to gain a volunteer and resource base for our campus drives.
We designed and organized a Star-Wars themed stem cell drive campaign called “May The Swab Be With You”. This campaign featured four separate drives this semester at various locations: Oakridge Mall, UVic, SFU, and UBC. The result was hundreds of new stem cell donors registered at each respective site.
In the year ahead, we are looking to become a community partner of OneMatch, which will allow us to run our own stem cell drives without a OneMatch representative present. We are also hoping to recruit NMP and SMP medical students to host drives at their campuses and continue our work to further boost the size of the Canadian stem cell donor registry.
For more information on stem cell donation and how you can register, please visit www.onematch.ca