South Asian Marrow Association of Recruiters

By

Asian Community Block

South Asian Marrow Association of Recruiters

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The South Asian Marrow Association of Recruiters (SAMAR) is a community based non-profit organization dedicated to finding bone marrow/blood stem cell donors for patients who are diagnosed with leukemia and other fatal blood disorders.   SAMAR is a certified group of the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), which is a congressionally authorized registry.  Presently, the NMDP maintains a database of over 6 million volunteer marrow donors, but only 34% of these are minorities.  Due to the polymorphism of the genetic system (HLA), a patient / donor match is preferably found from the same racial group.  Therefore, all effort is concentrated on registering committed minority donors.

  • Since 1992, SAMAR has been active in community projects and national conventions reaching out to a majority of the minority population with awareness and educational programs. In due course, the organization has had 1,000 registration drives adding 60,000 marrow donors to the national registry.
  • SAMAR is focused on the ongoing donor recruitment effort and has worked with national and international patients, facilitating over 50 actual marrow transplants from its recruitment.
  • The “Spring into Action, Save a Life” initiative was commenced in 2003 by SAMAR, the NMDP and the American Association of Physicians of Indian Origin (AAPI).  This joint venture with AAPI medical students/residents (MS/R) is part of SAMAR’s enduring dedication to the promotion of fatal blood disorder awareness and donor recruitment for the national registry.  AAPI MS/R and SAMAR are hard at work to make this initiative a long-term success.
  • Our Student Network Committee has successfully accessed several educational institutions, registering a large number of students as volunteer blood stem cell donors.
  • Another long-term goal is to establish a viable registry in India.  The country has a population of one billion people with a unique genetic diversity that can be a valuable source of potential donors worldwide.  Now initial funding has been obtained in Mumbai and the Marrow Donor Registry India (MDRI) has come into fruition as an established database.  This registry will be linked to the NMDP.

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Since 1992, we have served patients of South Asian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Philippine ethnicity as well as patients from other ethnic minorities.  With the support of AAARI, we hope to take our message to an even larger Asian and minority community to motivate them to join this humanitarian cause.   Together we can work to bring smiles back to life.

URL: www.samarinfo.org

Contact Us
SAMAR
55-13 96th St.
Rego Park, NY 11368
samarinfo@aol.com
Tel: (718) 592-0821
Fax: (718) 592-5848

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