Even as the country has around two lakh registered blood stem cell donors of the total population, not a single donor has been registered in the entire Northeastern states, said co-founder and project coordination of Gene Bandhu, Kapil Gupta.
Kapil said this at the one-day awareness programme on “Stem cell therapy and its recent advances” at the conference hall, Eden Medical Centre here on Monday. He is in the state on a two-day visit to conduct donor drives and to increase awareness on blood stem cell donation in the region.
He therefore, called for creating more awareness on donation drive in the Northeast region. He said people of northeast have the same gene pool and that patient would have a high chance of matching donor in the region. Kapil would also be visiting Dimapur Government College and SM College on Tuesday to create more awareness among the students, as the age group between 18-35 years has been considered as the most productive groups.
Genebandhu is a non-profit organization based in New Delhi focus on promotion of donation of voluntarily blood stem cell and to create hope, as well as resources, for patients that are in danger of falling prey to dangerous blood disorders like Leukemia (blood cancer), Aplastic Anemia, Thalassemia and Sickle cell Anaemia. According to Kapil, the role of Gene Bandhu, was to look for donors by conducting donor drives across the country and to increase awareness on blood stem cell donation.
The organization acts as donors’ registry (data base) and linked with various hospitals to find the match between patients and donors. Once the donors voluntarily came forward, the organization collect the saliva samples and store in their data base, he said. The country needs a large database of willing blood stem cell donors to help the cause, he said, adding that the presence of large data base in the country would provide high chances for the patient to find the match.
For patients, if a donor is found to be genetically matched from the registry in the country, transplant can be done with less expenditure. However, incase the donor was from outside the country registry then the cost of expenditure would be very high. Citing examples, he said if the donor was for the US registry, and the patient was from India, then the expenditure would be around Rs. 30-35 lakh excluding the cost of hospital expenses.
In case the donor was from the country registry the cost would be around Rs. 10 lakh, Kapil said. Therefore, Kapil reiterated that the country has to increase the number of donors on the registries. At present, Gene Bandhu has 13,000 registered blood stem cell donors and its target was to achieve one million by 2020. Started way back in 1998 (previously called ‘Safe Blood Organization’), the aim of Genebandhu is to build a repository of genetically “matched” donors i.e. donors that have a certain genetic make-up, which would be similar or identical to the one found in these patients.