Gift of Life
DESCRIPTION: This bank participates in the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) Cord Blood bank network. Gift of Life was founded in 1991 to seek a matching donor for leukemia patient Jay Feinberg. The last donor tested turned out to be a perfect match! Since then, the charity has evolved into a vehicle for bone marrow donor recruitment, focused on the international Jewish community. In 2005, they launched a Gift of Life Cord Blood program which collects from Maimonides hospital in Brooklyn, NY. The cost of the program is borne by Gift of Life fund-raising. In order for the donations to be listed on the NMDP network, obstetricians who collect for Gift of Life must undergo training and regular proficiency testing. The laboratory which processes and stores Cord Blood for Gift of Life is located at the University of Massachusetts; the laboratory director is Philip Lowry, M.D. The Gift of Life lab has AABB Accreditation and is seeking FACT Accreditation. There are research publications on “HLA polymorphism” among people of Jewish heritage (go to PubMed and search on these keywords), which show that they are more likely to find a donor match in their own ethnic type, and next among other Mediterranean groups.
COLLECTS FOR: Transplants
COLLECTS FROM: Brooklyn, NY
INTERNET: www.giftoflife.org or www.jcord.org
PHONE: 561-988-0100
STORAGE: University of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA
TRANSPLANT REGISTRIES: BMDW, CRIR, NMDP
StumbleUpon | Digg | Del.icio.us | Dzone | Newsvine | Spurl | Reddit | Yahoo! MyWeb
Leave a Reply