Foundation Pleads for Funds to Match Bone Marrow Donors With Recipients

A private organization dedicated to increasing the number of available donors for life-saving bone marrow transplants issued an emotional appeal Friday for more public and private funds to finance testing of hundreds of thousands of potential donors.

“I want the opportunity to live,” said Allison Atlas, a 20-year-old college student from Maryland who has leukemia and may die within the year if a donor is not found. “No one should die because they can’t find a donor.”

“We thought the problem would be getting people to come out to be tested,” said Allison’s father, Alvin Atlas, choking back tears. “We were wrong.”

Instead, hundreds of people seeking to help his daughter have been turned away because there is not enough money to pay for their blood tests. “Unless we raise more money, we will have to stop testing,” he said. “We have not found a donor for Allison.”

More than 9,000 Americans die every year from serious blood diseases that could be cured through marrow transplants, according to spokesmen for the private, nonprofit Life-Savers Foundation of America, a Covina, Calif.-based group that raises money and recruits potential donors.

Marrow, a tissue found within the bones, manufactures blood cells and antibodies. Each individual’s bone marrow is a particular type, known as an HLA type, for human leukocyte antigens. There are thousands of different HLA types, which are determined by markers found on the surface of white blood cells.

For a leukemia patient to be cured through marrow transplantation, a small amount of marrow from a healthy living person with the same HLA type must be transplanted into the patient after all cancer cells have been destroyed.

For the 70% of transplant candidates who cannot find a compatible marrow match with a close relative, the odds of finding a successful match with someone who is not a relative are about one in 20,000, foundation officers said. The chances are substantially less for blacks and some ethnic groups, they said.

Oakland, Calif., resident Calvin Davis, whose leukemia-stricken wife, Judie, is in a hospital “fighting for her life,” issued a special plea to black Americans.

“We haven’t had the luxury of turning people away yet,” Davis said. “The likelihood of getting a match is remote.” Davis and his wife are black.

In 1986, Congress authorized creation of the National Marrow Donor Program, as part of the National Institutes of Health, to coordinate transplants and maintain a registry of potential donors. Congress appropriated $3.7 million for the program for fiscal 1989.

But officers of the Life-Savers group said that at least $15 million more is needed to add 200,000 donors to the registry, which so far contains only about 67,000 names.

“Americans will respond to the critical needs of others,” said Dr. Rudolph Brutoco, a Los Angeles pediatrician who is founder and chairman of Life-Savers. “We have seen it happen again and again in every area of the country.”

Brutoco, whose wife, Diane, was found to have leukemia in 1988 and underwent a bone marrow transplant last March, said Life-Savers has recruited 34,000 marrow donors since it was founded a year ago. He said the group has contracted with private laboratories to perform the blood test at a cost of $75 a person.

Brutoco and others called on Congress to double its appropriation next year to more than $7 million and asked the Bush Administration to release discretionary funds available at the Department of Health and Human Services to fund more testing.

“The Bush Administration must help us in this moment,” said Bart S. Fisher, a Washington lawyer whose 7-year-old son died of aplastic anemia when a donor could not be found. “It could be done with the stroke of a pen.”

Potential donors are typically 18 to 55 years old, in good health, with no history of AIDS, hepatitis or cancer other than simple skin cancers. Testing is simple, requiring only a blood sample.

The donation procedure is more complicated. It involves extracting about 1 1/2 quarts of marrow from the hip bone, which the donor’s body eventually replaces.

Because the procedure can be painful, the surgery is usually done under anesthesia. The donor later experiences some stiffness or soreness, comparable to “the day after the first spring football practice,” said Dr. Patrick Beatty, director of the donor marrow transplant program at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle.

“It’s not nearly as hard on people as I’d thought it was going to be,” said David Staudt, a donor from Arlington, Va. “It’s really not a very difficult thing at all.”

BACKGROUND

Bone marrow transplants represent one of the most successful treatments for victims of leukemia, which destroys the marrow cells in which blood cells grow and develop. But the rejection rate is far higher than for other tissue transplants, and the odds of finding a suitable donor generally are no higher than 1 in 20,000. The procedure involves surgically extracting marrow tissue from a donor’s hip bone and transplanting it in the recipient.