NZ Bone Marrow Donor Registry

The New Zealand Bone Marrow Donor Registry (NZBMDR) lists approximately 8000 potential donors who are willing to donate cells from their bone marrow to patients world wide, if they are found to match someone in need of a transplant.

Each year, many patients are diagnosed with leukaemia or other serious blood disorders. For many of these patients a bone marrow transplant is the best and only hope for a cure.

On any given day, thousands of men, women and children are searching the International Bone Marrow Donor Registries for life-saving donors.

Your ethnicity plays an important role in bone marrow donation. Because tissue types are inherited, the patient is most likely to match someone in their close family, like a brother or a sister or someone of the same ethnicity.

Only one in three patients has a matched (tissue type) family member.

European patients have access to over 9 million Europeans on worldwide registries, compared to the 6,000 Maori and Pacific Islanders on the NZ Bone Marrow Donor Registry. Other ethnic groups are also not as well represented.

For this reason, the NZ Bone Marrow Donor Registry was established and is committed to focus on actively enrolling people of Maori and Pacific Island ancestry

If you're aged between 18 - 40 years and your ancestors were Maori, Pacific Island or any other NZ ethnic minority group, please consider joining the Registry. It could mean the difference between life and death to someone needing a bone marrow transplant.

To join, you must donate a unit of blood at any NZ Blood Service Donor Centre nationwide. Please visit our website for more information.