Gift of Life is a leading blood stem cell and bone marrow registry that recruits volunteer donors and facilitates lifesaving transplants for patients diagnosed with leukemia, lymphoma, sickle cell disease, and over 75 other blood cancers and inherited immune diseases.
In 1991, Jay was just 23 and about to start law school when he was diagnosed with leukemia. A bone marrow transplant from a matching donor could save him, but, while his brothers where perfect matches for each other, they didn’t match Jay.
The recently founded national marrow registry was building a database of volunteer donors, but there were too few Jewish donors registered at the time. However, as doctors told Jay to put together a bucket list and enjoy the time he had left, Jay and his parents Arlene and Jack, remained hopeful and defiant. Turning their dining room table into the command center of an international grassroots campaign, recruitment drives were held to find the one matching donor who could save Jay.
More than 60,000 people were ultimately tested, finding matches for many patients along the way, yet four years passed with no match for Jay. On the last day of the last recruitment drive, Becky Keller, inspired by Jay’s story, overcame her fear of needles and was tested at the end of the day.
Thanks to an incredible sequence of improbable events, Becky Keller was soon identified as a match for Jay. She agreed to donate her marrow to save Jay’s life. However, after recovering from his transplant, Jay wondered what would happen to the many other patients who were still hoping to find their donor. With tens of thousands tested and a new lease on life, Jay founded the Gift of Life Marrow Registry to pay it forward.
With Jay’s heartwarming and miraculous story in mind, Gift of Life was founded with the simple goal of providing stem cell and marrow transplants to anyone who needs them when they need them. For the last three decades, Jay and this organization have been dedicated to helping those who need a matching donor to save their lives.
“When Becky decided to donate her marrow, it saved more than one life; it has saved thousands and the ripple effect of that single action continues to this day.”
Gift of Life becomes a member of the World Marrow Donor Association, making all the donors in its registry available for search in the worldwide database. Today, 35-40% of Gift of Life’s stem cell collections save the lives of patients in 47 countries around the world.
Gift of Life becomes the first registry to use cheek swabs instead of blood draws at donor recruitment drives. Cheek swabs were quickly adopted by other registries around the world.
As decades of analysis reveal that transplants from younger donors give patients a higher chance of survival, Gift of Life steps up its college campus recruiting, holding drives on 82 campuses to recruit over 20,000 healthy donors.
Gift of Life relocates to a new, 43,560 sq. ft. headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida that incorporates a state-of-the-art stem cell collection center.
Gift of Life launches Biologics to provide high quality cell and gene therapy starting materials for biomedical research to develop new immunotherapies and gene therapies.
Gift of Life launches NexGen to recruit donors for research purposes. The program serves the needs of cell and gene therapy developers with rapid-turnaround requests sourced from a pool of pre-qualified donors local to Gift of Life’s apheresis center.
Gift of Life introduces Hero Gum. When a new donor chews Hero Gum, we can collect the immune system information required to match our donors with recipients in need.
Gift of Life expands the Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Gift of Life- NMDP Collection Center featuring a world-class donor experience and increases the number of donor suites from 7 to 11.
Joining the registry takes just a few minutes. You provide basic information and complete a cheek swab. That’s it!
You could be the reason someone gets a second chance at life!
