Feature

By Rachna Choudhry

You Could Be His Perfect Match: South Asian Bone Marrow Donation

When Vinay Chakravarthy began experiencing severe exhaustion and bone pain last November, he attributed it to his grueling schedule as a medical resident. But after talking to his brother, an emergency room physician, he underwent a series of tests. His symptoms turned out to be Acute Myeloid Leukemia.

Vinay, a 28-year old orthopedics resident at Boston Medical Center, was just beginning a new phase of life when he was diagnosed. He married his wife Rashmi, a medical student, in 2005, and the couple had just celebrated their first wedding anniversary. Since November, Vinay has undergone intensive chemotherapy, but last month he received the difficult news that the chemotherapy was not effective. He now needs a bone marrow transplant to survive.

More than 35,000 people suffering from life-threatening blood diseases such as leukemia are in need of bone marrow or blood cell transplants. While 30 percent of patients find a matched donor within their family, the other 70 percent must find an unrelated donor, according to the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP). Since 1987, more than 23,400 patients have found donors through the NMDP.

Since tissue traits are inherited, patients are most likely to find a donor within their racial and ethnic communities. For children of immigrant parents, like Vinay, finding a match within their family requires a daunting search. With most of his relatives living in India, and without a match among his immediate family, he has now broadened his search to find an unrelated donor. Unfortunately, only 100,000 donors in the registry are of South Asian descent—and the chances of finding a match for a South Asian patient, according to the NMDP, is one in 20,000.

Pia Awal faced similar odds when the leukemia she thought she had beaten in 2002 returned in 2004, and her only chance of survival was a bone marrow transplant. Through a personal website, www.matchpia.org, and with the help of their friends, Pia and her husband were able to register 30,000 new donors—and find a match for Pia. Now, the couple have expanded their efforts in India, where they’ve created the United South Asian Donor Registry. Already, they’ve been able to recruit more than 4,000 donors in India—matching 69 patients.

Vinay’s friends and family are conducting donor drives across the country—and in India as well. Vinay’s goal is to register 20,000 new donors by July 9th, the deadline his doctors have set for him to find a match. By meeting this goal, he hopes to beat his odds and survive with a bone marrow transplant. So far, Vinay has helped register over 6,000 new donors and has seven days left.

You could be Vinay’s perfect match.

Visit www.helpvinay.org to find out how you can register as a bone marrow donor, find donor drives in your area and read Vinay’s blog to monitor his progress. On the website, you will also find public service announcements starring actors Kal Penn, Revathy and Ravi Kapoor, which you can e-mail to other South Asians you know.

Joining the registry is simple and only requires a swab of cheek cells for tissue typing. For more information about the donor process, please visit the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) at www.marrow.org.

Rachna Choudhry coordinates policy for a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of working women. A California native, she lives in Washington, DC and has previously worked for the union and civil rights movements.

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