Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Saving Lives With Stem Cell Transplants, Damien Sheehan-Connor, Ted Bergstrom, Rodney Garratt

Ted C Bergstrom

For patients with certain diseases, blood stem cell transplants can be life-saving. But a transplant is likely to be successful only if the immune systems of the donor and recipient are a close genetic match. Human immune systems are extremely diverse and a patient's chances of finding a matching donor would be small without the ability to search a very large number of possible donors. For this reason, most advanced nations maintain large registries of potential donors who have offered to donate stem cells if they happen to be the best available match for a patient needing a transplant. In …