Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide
| Non-profit | |
| Industry | Health Care |
| Founded | Leiden, NL (1986) |
| Headquarters | Leiden, NL |
| Website |
www |
Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide (BMDW) is an organization based in Leiden, Netherlands, that coordinates the collection of the HLA phenotypes and other relevant data of volunteer hematopoietic cell donors and cord blood units.
BMDW participants (as of February 2014) comprise 72 hematopoietic cell donor registries from 52 countries, and 48 cord blood banks from 33 countries. Taking all these registries together, the BMDW database includes almost 22.5 million stem cell donors and 605,000 cord blood units, making it the largest database in the world. The database is searchable by authorized transplanting physicians and search coordinators, and there are currently 850 users from 520 organizations authorized to perform online searches of registries and cord blood banks participating with the BMDW.[1]
BMDW
Started in 1988 with its office in Leiden (the Netherlands), the BMDW Editorial Board consists of one representative of each stem cell donor registry or cord blood bank participating in BMDW, and meets twice a year to discuss achievements and necessary improvements.
BMDW is a service provided and managed by Europdonor Foundation.
Mission statement
BMDW is a voluntary collaborative effort of stem cell donor registries and cord blood banks whose goal is to provide centralized information on the HLA phenotypes and other relevant data of unrelated stem cell donors and cord blood units and to make this information easily accessible to the physicians of patients in need of a hematopoietic stem cell transplant.
Main goals
The original goal to collect the HLA phenotypes of volunteer stem cell donors and cord blood units, and to co-ordinate their worldwide distribution remain our primary goals. But new initiatives have been added:
- To maximize the chance of finding a stem cell donor or cord blood unit by providing access to all stem cell donors and cord blood units available in the world.
- To minimize the effort required for stem cell donor or cord blood unit searches: only registries with potential stem cell donors or cord blood units need to be contacted.
- To provide an estimate of the chance of finding a stem cell donor or cord blood unit for a given patient.
- To provide advanced search programs to identify partially matched stem cell donors or cord blood units.
- To facilitate search advice requests via the Internet.
- To facilitate improvements in family search strategies.
- To provide relevant general information for the benefit of the patient.
- To provide statistics on the increase of different registries, the number of DNA typed donors, etc.