A persistent friend and a willingness to help others helped Towaco resident Nicole Fierro save a life. Fierro’s friend Sydney Kirsch was a student at Syracuse University when Kirsch learned of the need for volunteers to swab their cheeks and possibly become stem cell or bone marrow donors to save the lives of those with blood cancer.

Anthony Nolan is a UK based charity first set up by Shirley Nolan to find a matched hematopoietic stem cell donor for her son, Anthony. To this day our mission remains the same, to save and improve the lives of everyone who needs a hematopoietic cell transplant (HCT). Anthony Nolan has over 45 years’ experience of working with donors via the stem cell registry to provide hematopoietic cells for patients in need of a transplant across the globe...Gift of Life Marrow Registry also in the United States of America has developed Gift of Life Biologics, an all-in-one solution for cell and gene therapy developers.

Eight years ago, when Rebecca "Becca" Berg went on a Birthright trip to Israel, her group met with volunteers from Gift of Life. The nonprofit runs a bone marrow and blood stem cell registry that helps facilitate transplants for children and adults suffering from life-threatening illnesses, including leukemia, lymphoma, other cancers, and genetic diseases. Berg was asked if she would be willing to sign up for the registry and be swabbed, in the hopes that she might someday be a match for someone in grave need of bone marrow or stem cells.

There was hardly a dry eye in the room last month when Sheila Barry, a retired college professor in Massachusetts, met the man who give her life – Brady Goldstein of St. Petersburg. It came as a total surprise to the professor. It took place in a lecture room at Stonehill College south of Boston as Sheila was telling about 60 students how a stranger had given her a much-needed donation of stem cells that saved her life from a form of cancer that affects the blood cells in the bone marrow.

You have heard it before… pickleball is more than a sport. And, one pickleball player from the Delray Beach, Florida community is proving that to be true. In fact, she is proving that pickleball is the vehicle to find and build a community. Daniella Niss started playing pickleball a few years ago with her husband, Michael, as a way to do something fun together and exercise.

In the early 1990s, Yehuda Kaplan was gravely ill with lymphoma and was urgently seeking a bone marrow transplant—a lifesaving procedure that removes blood-forming stem cells from a healthy donor’s bones and transplants them into a person who does not have enough healthy blood cells, due to a serious illness. While the transplants are highly effective, they are quite rare, as they require both the donor and recipient to be a perfect genetic match.