National Marrow Donor Program
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| Non-profit | |
| Industry | Health care |
| Founded | St. Paul, Minnesota, USA (1986) |
| Headquarters | Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA |
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Key people
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Jeff Chell, M.D., CEO Dennis L. Confer, M.D., Chief Medical Officer |
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Number of employees
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860 (January 2013) |
| Website |
BeTheMatchClincal.org BeTheMatch.org |
The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1986 and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota that operates the Be The Match Registry of volunteer hematopoietic cell donors and umbilical cord blood units in the United States.
The Be The Match Registry is the world's largest hematopoietic cell registry, listing more than 10.5 million individuals and nearly 185,000 cord blood units. Hematopoietic cells from NMDP donors or cord blood units are used to transplant patients with a variety of blood, bone marrow or immune system disorders. As of January 2013, the NMDP had facilitated more than 55,000 transplants worldwide.
The NMDP coordinates the collection of hematopoietic ("blood-forming") cells that are used to perform what used to be called bone marrow transplants, but are now more properly called hematopoietic cell transplants. Patients needing a hematopoietic cell transplant but who lack a suitably matched donor in their family can search the Be The Match registry for a matched unrelated donor or cord blood unit.
Hematopoietic cells are used to transplant patients with life-threatening disorders such as leukemia, lymphoma, aplastic anemia, as well as certain immune system and metabolic disorders. Hematopoietic cells can come from bone marrow, umbilical cord blood, or the circulating blood (peripheral blood stem cells (PBSCs)). Hematopoietic cells are a type of adult (i.e., non-embryonic) stem cell that can multiply and differentiate into the three types of blood cells: red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets.
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