Lara is a 24-year-old Chinese-Thai-Italian student passionate about human rights and refugee issues.

She was diagnosed with an aggressive form of Acute Myeloid Leukemia in December 2015, and was told that a stem cell transplant was her best hope of a cure. As only 3% of the donors on the worldwide registry identify as mixed-race,  her mixed heritage makes it extremely hard to find a suitable stem cell donor.

 

Lara's family and friends started #match4lara to help find Lara and others a match. Despite the odds against her, on Feb 4th, World Cancer Day, Lara’s family were told that a suitable donor was found!  

Of the 25 million people already on the registry, only a handful were identified as potential matches and from these one 9 out of 10 match was available.   The search gave family, friends and Lara a sense of resolve and hope in the face of such a devastating situation. From the beginning, Lara and the family emphasized that #match4lara was a campaign to recruit new donors onto registries to help anyone that needed a stem cell donation, particularly those from under-represented ethnicities on the worldwide registries.

 

By joining a national bone marrow registry you can provide a potential gift of life to 37,000 patients like Lara in their time of greatest need.