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About Us

Creating connections. Saving lives.

The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and our fundraising partner, The Marrow Foundation, 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 men, women and children get life-threatening diseases like leukemia and lymphoma. Many of them will die unless they get a bone marrow or cord blood transplant from a genetically matched donor. Some people find a match in their family, but 70% do not. These patients depend on the NMDP to help them find an unrelated donor or cord blood unit.

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 has grown to 7 million donors and 70,000 cord blood units — the largest and most racially and ethnically diverse Registry of its kind in the world.

Medical advances are making marrow and cord blood transplants available to more patients all the time. Since 1987, we have arranged for more than 30,000 transplants to give patients a second chance at life. Today, we facilitate almost 4,000 transplants a year.

As a leader in the field of marrow and cord blood transplantation, every day we work 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:

Add more volunteers to our 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
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. By 2015, we expect to facilitate 10,000 transplants a year. 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 11 million donors and 290,000 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 Registry
Make a contribution
Stay in touch — sign up for e-mail updates about our work and how you can help
Engage your organization

And to learn more about our community of patients, families and people who care, visit:

LifeJourneys Transplant Community — read tributes to patients and donors and make a contribution