A lifesaving gift: Greek life bone marrow drives at ASU make an impact
Jamie Katz (far right) tabling for Gift of Life at Arizona State University. Courtesy photo
Arizona State University’s bone marrow donor drives are making an impact and saving lives, with 145 Gift of Life drives held on campus since 2016 and more than 17% of those campus drives championed by ASU’s fraternities and sororities.
Traci Ackerman, manager of strategic partnerships for Gift of Life, said that college campuses and Greek life donor drives play a key role in recruitment of new donors.
“Greek life is important to Gift of Life because of their community service and philanthropic activities that they take part in. We find that getting in front of a Greek audience is just a natural fit,” Ackerman said. “A lot of our national partners are different fraternities — whether they are social fraternities, co-ed, service fraternities — and they do a lot of work.”
“Since January of 2016, we have swabbed 3,240 people on ASU's campus. That includes faculty, staff and primarily students,” Ackerman said. “Of that, 72 of those people have been identified as a potential match for a patient. And of those 72, 10 have so far actually donated to give someone a second chance at life.”
Graduate student Jamie Katz received a life-changing call while getting ready to start her PhD in psychology at ASU — she was selected to donate bone marrow.
“I actually got called as a match as I was moving to Arizona State. I was driving cross-country, and I got the call,” Katz said. “I ended up missing my first week of graduate school and orientation because I donated to someone with leukemia.”
Katz said that the odds of being selected as a match and successfully donating bone marrow is incredibly rare.
“It's a 1-in-400 chance that you match, and then if you're the match, it's 1 in 5 that you actually donate,” Katz said. “And then 93% of the time, it's just done through apheresis. But I actually did the bone marrow way, which is only 7% of the time. The odds of everything happening were almost zero.”
When her cousin was diagnosed with leukemia at just 11 years old, Katz was motivated to begin her work in helping find people to sign up for bone marrow registries.
“I was 7 at the time, everyone in our family was swabbed, but no one was a match,” Katz said. “And thankfully, she responded to the drug that she was given. She got on a drug trial, and it put her into remission, and she's doing really well. She just had her second child. But obviously, not every family is that lucky.
“And so, when I got called as a match, it was really special because I was a match for an 11-year-old girl,” she said. “Same age and gender as my cousin and same diagnosis, too. It felt very meant-to-be that I was able to help a family in the same situation as my own.”
While studying for her undergraduate degree at the University of Richmond in Virginia, Katz acted as a student ambassador for Gift of Life, encouraging her fellow Greek life students to sign up.
“I went around to every single Greek chapter there and signed up everyone that I knew for Gift of Life and to join the bone marrow registry. And I think it ended up being like 750 people. And through that work in undergraduate and my time as an ambassador at ASU, I have facilitated 64 matches and six transplants with Gift of Life.”
After her own bone marrow donation at the start of her first semester at ASU, Katz continued her work as a student ambassador for Gift of Life and regularly hosts donor drives both on and off campus.
“Everyone that I met in the ASU community, the first thing they knew about me was, ‘Oh, she missed the first week of school because she was donating bone marrow.’ And so that's become part of my identity,” she said. “I got re-involved with Gift of Life as a grad student because I felt reinvigorated by my own experience donating and felt like my story was one that would be helpful to share and get people excited about registering.”
With the likelihood of being selected as a bone marrow match so low, it’s critical to continue to expand the list of potential donors.
“Every day, patients lose their battle because their donors aren't found,” Ackerman said. “Blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma are curable through transplant, as well as sickle cell and 96 other blood disorders. There are just not enough people on the worldwide registry. And with that, there is a lack of diversity.
“It's huge that people learn about us, know who we are, and then take that step to join the registry. I've been on the registry for a lot of years; I've never been called as a match. The odds are you probably will never be called.”
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