Be The Match Executive Summary

Every three minutes, a person is diagnosed with a deadly blood cancer, such as myeloma, leukemia, and lymphoma. Medical professionals can treat these blood cancers with peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) and bone marrow transplants, saving the patient’s life. Unfortunately, seventy percent of blood cancer patients do not have a PBSC or bone marrow match within their own family, making it challenging for these individuals to get the care that they need to survive (BeTheMatch.org, 2022). Making matters even worse, statistics show that patients with more diverse backgrounds are less likely to find a match. While Caucasians have a seventy-nine percent chance of finding a match, Native Americans have a sixty percent chance, Hispanics have a forty-eight percent chance, Asians/Pacific Islanders have a forty-seven percent chance, and Blacks only have an abysmal twenty-nine percent chance of finding a match (BeTheMatch.org, 2022). Be The Match, the only congressionally supported national registry of volunteer bone marrow and PBSC donors, is an organization with a mission to save lives through cellular therapies. They accomplish this mission by both educating and registering young and committed potential donors to address the abhorrent racial and ethnic disparities that exist in finding a match. Be The Match has performed more than 111,000 hematopoietic stem cell (cells found in bone marrow) transplants since 1987 and has 39 million donors on their donor list (BeTheMatch.org, 2022). Since there is a blatant inequality concerning bone marrow and PBSC donations, as well as a lack of matches on the donor list, our group set a goal to work with Be The Match to educate Binghamton University students about the conditions requiring bone marrow and PBSC transplants, why they are important, and how they can get involved through joining a donor registry by swabbing their cheek on campus. This increases the odds of finding a suitable match for those who need them.

Our group utilized social media as well as in-person informational tabling around campus to educate people. We set up two informational tables on campus, capturing the attention of 108 college students to teach them about blood cancers, bone marrow donations, PBSC donations, and our cheek swab events. Also, our group created and ran an Instagram page to educate people that contained both informational posts about Be The Match and advertisements for upcoming opportunities to attend our cheek swab drives to join the donor registry. We garnered 4,549 total views in the few short months since the account’s creation. On Weibo, a Chinese online video platform, we posted a video that generated 229K views to raise awareness internationally about the importance of organizations such as Be The Match that help save blood cancer patients’ lives. Our group also conducted a poll to test whether we successfully educated people. Individuals completed the poll both before and after our final cheek swab drive and we found that understanding about blood cancers and Be The Match increased by 108.71%.

We were humbled and grateful for the sheer turnout that we saw. With our extensive focus on education and thorough advertising around Binghamton University's campus, we all hoped that our fellow students would show their altruism and eagerness to help those in need by joining the Be The Match registry. With the background knowledge that 1 in 100 potential donors who register from college campuses are match and then donate, this means that our total of 166 students who were swabbed to join the Be The Match registry will save 1.66 lives. The successes that we as a group experienced on campus only go to show that college campuses are viable hot-spots for willing and potential donors; we were the second largest turnout of any college in New York that worked with Be The Match, demonstrating that commitment and a will to do good can go a long way. For the purposes of spreading awareness and saving lives, we are using our story as a call to action for all of those who want to make a difference in this world. The disparities that many face concerning medical care, access to medicines, and equitable treatment opportunities is a wide chasm that we as people can begin bridging together today. By educating young people on campus or in the community, we can work as one to take steps toward an equitable future in which more and more people have the resources to attain a minimally good life.