The Brown & White

The Lehigh football team hosted a bone marrow testing drive Sunday at Grace Hall to find matches to treat people with different types of blood and bone marrow cancers.

Football players gathered on the sidewalk in front of Grace Hall, calling out to pedestrians to get a blood test. Football player Al Pierce, '10, said it's rare to find match for bone marrow transplants.

"If your DNA matches, you can save a life, and so it is very important to find as many people as possible," Pierce said.

Blood and bone marrow cancers, such as leukemia, can be treated with a bone marrow transplant, which involves killing off the cancerous stem cells in the patient's bone marrow with a high dose of chemotherapy and replacing them with healthy stem cells.

These healthy stem cells can only come from a person with the genetic markers, making the chances of finding a bone marrow match slim, between 1 and 20,000 and 1 and 100,000 for an unrelated person.

"We want to get as many people on the National Registry as potential donors, as possible," said assistant football coach Donald Roberts. "The more DNA we get, the more the chance that we will find a match."

He also said that people from different minority backgrounds are especially valuable because it is more difficult to find a match.

"If your DNA ever matches, you will be informed, so that you can donate some of your blood," Roberts said. "The healthy stem cells are then extracted from the blood, by a process called peripheral stem cell harvest."

This program, initiated by head coach Andy Tally of Villanova University, targeted 5,000 donors from among 30 colleges, who are between age of 18 and 60.

Nancy Ortiz, the recruitment coordinator for the HLA Registry, which is named after the genetic marker that they're trying to match, said this was the first time that Lehigh Valley colleges had become involved.

"Last year, such an effort collectively registered 2,600 donors from among 26 colleges," Ortiz said.

The registry works for Be the Match which is operated by National Marrow Donor Program.

Ben Harding, '10, added, "We are also trying to make the program known to more and more people."