BecomeMyHero.net

Become My Hero finds cord blood donors for anyone in imminent danger of dying from diseases like leukemia, sickle cell anemia, multiple sclerosis and lupus because he or she needs a bone marrow transplant to treat the disease but can't find a match in a donor registry. We differ from organizations such as the NMDP and DKMS in that we are not a public registry. We work for the sole benefit of people who have not been able to find a donor in a public registry or via their own bone marrow donor recruitment drives and are in imminent need of a donor to survive or are in remission but wish to have matching stem cells in hand in the event that they relapse and need a transplant. Most importantly, we almost exclusively look for cord blood and not bone marrow donors. Cord blood is obtained from the umbilical cord that links a mother and child. The blood present in the umbilical cord is a rich source of the same stem cells found in bone marrow. They, however, offer the advantage of not causing life-threatening graft versus host responses that frequently occur with bone marrow stem cells. That means your chance of surviving a transplant and, therefore, your disease is much, much greater. Cord blood stem cells are now being used to treat more than 80 medical conditions and diseases.