Creating connections. Saving lives.
The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and our Be The Match FoundationSM are nonprofit organizations dedicated to creating an opportunity for all patients to receive the bone marrow or umbilical cord blood transplant they need, when they need it.

Our mission
Every year, thousands of people of all ages are diagnosed with leukemia and other life-threatening diseases. Many of them will die unless they get a bone marrow or cord blood transplant from a matching donor. Seventy percent of people do not have a donor in their family and depend on our Be The Match RegistrySM to find a match to save their life.

Our story
When their 10-year-old daughter Laura was diagnosed with leukemia, Robert Graves, D.V.M., and his wife Sherry were rea... (more)

Creating connections. Saving lives.
The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and our Be The Match FoundationSM are nonprofit organizations dedicated to creating an opportunity for all patients to receive the bone marrow or umbilical cord blood transplant they need, when they need it.

Our mission
Every year, thousands of people of all ages are diagnosed with leukemia and other life-threatening diseases. Many of them will die unless they get a bone marrow or cord blood transplant from a matching donor. Seventy percent of people do not have a donor in their family and depend on our Be The Match RegistrySM to find a match to save their life.

Our story
When their 10-year-old daughter Laura was diagnosed with leukemia, Robert Graves, D.V.M., and his wife Sherry were ready to do anything they could to save her. They agreed to try a bone marrow transplant from an unrelated donor — the first ever for a leukemia patient.

Laura received her transplant in 1979 at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. The treatment gave her an extra year and a half of life.

And it inspired Dr. Graves to launch a quest to create a national registry of volunteers willing to donate bone marrow. His early efforts brought together other patient families and transplant doctors, spurring a federal mandate that led to the creation of the National Marrow Donor Program. We began connecting patients with unrelated donors in 1987 with a registry of just 10,000 volunteers.

Today
Our registry — now called the Be The Match Registry — has grown to more than 7 million donors and nearly 100,000 cord blood units, the largest and most racially and ethnically diverse registry of its kind in the world.

Medical advances are making marrow and umbilical cord blood transplants available to more patients all the time. Since 1987, we have arranged for more than 33,000 transplants to give patients a second chance at life. Today, we facilitate more than 4,300 transplants a year.

As a leader in the field of marrow and cord blood transplantation, we work every day to connect patients, doctors, donors and researchers to the resources they need. To help people of every racial and ethnic background live longer, healthier lives, we:

* Offer people the unique opportunity to save a life through Be The Match
* Add more members and donated umbilical cord blood to our Be The Match Registry every day
* Support patients with resources and services to reduce barriers to transplant and improve their quality of life after transplant
* Educate doctors about transplant advances and patient care post transplant
* Conduct and support cutting-edge research to advance the science of transplant
* Help any eligible family who may benefit from a related donor cord blood transplant
* Develop innovative tools, systems and services so we can continue to increase the number of patients we serve


Building for the future
Many more patients still need our help. We are working to meet this need, but we can’t do it alone. Our efforts are sustained by:

* A global Network of more than 490 leading hospitals, blood centers, laboratories and recruiters
* Agreements with cooperative donor registries and cord blood banks worldwide through which we provide patients access to more than 12 million donors and 300,000 cord blood units
* The U.S. government, which has entrusted us to operate the C. W. Bill Young Cell Transplantation Program, the federal program supporting bone marrow and cord blood donation and transplantation
* Partnerships with corporations, service organizations, student groups, faith-based communities and other organizations
* People like you


Get involved. Help save a life.

* Join the Be The Match Registry
* Make a financial contribution
* Stay in touch
* Engage your organization (less)