Health Beat's Kathryn Davis interviews Gift of Life Marrow Registry's Founder and CEO, Jay Feinberg, who is also a marrow transplant survivor.

Michele Rudd says she wouldn’t be here if not for the selfless act of a college student who volunteered to swab his cheek. That cheek swab eventually led to a life-saving bone marrow transplant for the 46-year-old Leslie mother of four. Rudd got to meet the donor, Jakob Gillberg, 28, of Allston, Massachusetts, at a celebration by the Gift of Life Marrow Registry in Boston in early May.

Woodmere resident Dr. Adam Lish was not at Citi Field on May 20 just to watch his beloved New York Mets play the Washington Nationals. He was also there to reunite with a special individual. Lish and Brian Veith, 24, of Burlington, Conn., reconnected after 15 years, when Lish donated his bone marrow to the then 9-year-old Veith, who had immune disorder, familial erythrocytosis lymphohistiocytosis. The reunion was through the Gift of Life Marrow Registry.

Wendy Fullem, a 54-year-old administrator at a New Jersey college, hadn't been feeling well for some time when, in fall 2016, she was diagnosed with leukemia. Leukemia is a type of blood cancer that comes in many forms. There were about 60,000 new cases in the US last year, and one treatment option is a bone marrow transplant, a decades-old scientific procedure that has potential to treat upwards of 70 different diseases, including many types of cancer.

When Ryan Corning ’18 joined the Gift of Life Marrow Registry the summer prior to coming to Elon to study mathematics, he never fully expected that he would one day become a donor. Then during his sophomore year in college, he got a call saying he was a match for someone who had been diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia.

WPBF television covers the opening of the new Gift of Life Marrow Registry Headquarters in Boca Raton, Fla. The site also houses a state-of-the-art, registry-integrated stem cell collection center.