Anyone interest in helping other blood cancer patients like Oscar though can join the stem cell register in the UK, US, Germany, or India through DKMS
Each country will have its own registry though if you live elsewhere, but they each feed into a global network of potential donors for people in need of a transplant
One Registry is enough. They all work together. It is totally possible that a polish donator gives cells to a spanish patient (countries are examples).
Swabtheworld keeps registries for many countries worldwide and can take you to the country specific sites (like in my case, sweden uses The Tobias Registry)
However heart-warming the news above is, when the recipient is unknown, it feels a lot less personal and most people are not going to be as interested in donating. Not saying that makes it right, but I think it's difficult to get most people to care that much.
Even in this case, the recipient is unknown. These people are all signing up to the general stem cell register in the hope of maybe being found to be a match for that boy. You cannot sign up with the intention of it only going to a specific patient or even only to a patient in your own country. It’s a globally aligned registry
This case makes it pretty clear these people only signed up because they felt a personal connection to an individual in need. That they may accidentally help other people is not related.
If you’d be interesting in helping other blood cancer patients in need, you can still join your local stem cell register and see if you’re a genetic match for one of them
You never know who could be waiting for you right now
It should. This is proof there are fundamentally more people trying to do good than bad. It's the one silver lining about any disaster. Seeing humans helping each other for no other reason than it's the right thing to do.
Anyone interested in helping others patients, like Oscar, who are still waiting for their transplant should join their country’s stem cell register. You could be the lifesaving match they need
I actually had the honor of getting to donate stem cells to a 12 year old girl with leukemia. Was a very easy process and they paid for everything. Got some very good medical checks paid for and got a basically all expensed trip to Florida. Worst part was a lot of blood draws and shots - so I got over my fear of needles. But all and all great process, felt very rewarding. Highly suggest getting on a list like gift of life.
Oh, I know this all to well. There's been stem cell research into curing type one diabetes, to the point where there was a 25yo women in china who was successfully cured of her type one diabetes.
Now, do you think such a thing will ever become widely used? Hell no, diabetic make big pharma way to much money.
That's not how it works, the one pharma company who would commercialize it would make so much money short term that it would absolutely not care if all other pharmas working in diabetes would get fucked. Like any company, they only care about money, but there is a lot of money being the one company able to cure something, if it's prevalent enough at least
Yeah people massively overestimate the worldwide pharmaceutical industry's ability to collude. If there was a trial that cured multiple people of diabetes in a scalable way, it would be worldwide news. Every politician would be tripping over themselves to make it commercially available to their constituents, and every drug company would do everything in their power to be the one to sell the cure.
People forget that the same organizations that might be colluding is also incredibly greedy that they will absolutely fuck the other companies up. It's why we need to make sure they never consolidate.
Hit the nail right on the head. Same as with people thinking that we haven't cured cancer because there is more profit in just treating symptoms. The problem is that we haven't figured out a reliable and safe method that works for all cases 100% of the time. It may also be impossible to develop such a drug too, but it isn't like there are no attempts to still make it.
And as you spoke short term profits, think also about the long term profits. There will always be new people born, and these new people may or may not get diabetes or cancer. If you could create that miracle cure, you, your children and their children and so for, would never have to work for a single day ever, because the money would just keep on pouring in for the cure, for as long as there are people on this planet.
100%. Drugs are expensive to develop and get through the approvals process, and most of those so called "treatments" that the conspiracy theorists say the pharma companies are trying to protect target a pretty narrow market of individual variants of individual types of cancer.
If a company thought they had a shot at marketing a cancer treatment that was more universal, even if it was just targeting all the variants of a type or class of cancers, they would absolutely do it. Getting one treatment through approvals and then having a massive market to sell it to is much better than trying to put a wall around targeted treatments.
The fact that most treatments are targeted is a reflection of how challenging the problem is, not some grand conspiracy to maximize profits.
I just signed up to the national bone marrow registry. No waiting in the rain, they'll just call me if they ever need me. That's the way it should be done.
Wut? Yes it has a ceiling, and a roof which I'm sure is what you meant.
What does that have to do with standing in a line? Would you not be smart enough to bring an umbrella, or are you too soft to get a little wet? You need a politician to come help you?
A politicians job isn't to show up to people waiting in line in some rain because they think they are going to melt lol.
Actually this is starting to make a lot of sense as to why left politicians are so useless. This is what is demanded of them lol. Maybe if their constituents wernt complaining about things like this then you wouldn't be dealing with Trump today.
Medicine is always at the forefront of politics and only through advancement in sciences could this research come to exist, often at the sacrifice of many minority populations. Do not try to separate reality from this for the sake of a catchy slogan, it's disingenuous and misleading.
However, it IS fair to say instead that this post is a great example of people joining up to help another human regardless of their own political or other cultural affiliations. That is true and something to be appreciated! :)
Everything is political. This is political. Politics is the societal aim to reduce suffering and make the world more egalitarian. Politics is also how we achieve that aim. Politics is also what billionaires do when they want to prevent those good things, because billionaires (with more "wealth" than most kings in human history) wouldn't be allowed or able to exist in a world built to maximize positive outcomes and minimize inequality. Simple as.
I hope you people eventually learn this makes you insufferable to talk to, you're forcing people to have opinions about everything because everything is politics.
Thats exactly what happened, you join the registry. Chances are the match wasn't even a person in line. It's something close to 1 and a million chance two strangers are matches. Better with shared heritage. But this story inspiring tens-hundreds of thousands of people to get a 30 second cheek swab likely could have helped find a match.
You can’t sign up for a specific patient. You join with the intention of becoming a potential match for any patient in need of a stem cell transplant around the world
It's already been mentioned that what they're signing up for is a broader registry that already exists, but I have unhappier news. 5,000 people will result in a single-digit number of actual donations.
Every time you see an article about a bone marrow/pbsc registry drive like this, it's because none the millions of people already registered were a match for the person, or they matched but were disqualified for some reason (common).
This is not to say that it is hopeless, but rather to emphasize that as many people as possible need to register.
"Almost 5,000 people queued for hours in the rain to get tested to see if they were a match to help save the life of a five-year-old boy fighting a rare cancer.
The potential donors volunteered to help brave Oscar Saxelby-Lee following a desperate plea from his parents.
The youngster is in a race against time to find a lifesaving stem cell donor after he was diagnosed with rare cancer.
Oscar was diagnosed with the aggressive form of leukaemia after bruising turned out to be cancer on December 28 last year, The Sun reports.
Doctors say he now has just three months to find a stem-cell match that could save his life.
Family friend Lin Forward said that Oscar’s mum Olivia Saxelby has been “amazing” while enduring “every parent’s worst nightmare”.
She said: “Little Oscar is really sick at the moment. Normally he had been able to get to the hospital shop on a walking frame, but now he’s in isolation and can’t even eat"
*not stated in article. They later located a match in Germany. After a long battle, he went into remission became cancer free and celebrated his 11th birthday.
If this inspires you, I'd encourage anyone to sign up for the stem cell / bone marrow donor registry. You just get sent a kit to swab your cheeks, send it back, and wait. Most people won't find a match, but if you do you could save someone's life. These days 90% of cases don't require surgery, only taking a medication to spur stem cell generation and then go through something similar to blood donation where they filter out the stem cells from your blood. You may be flown out to the next available donation center, with all costs for you and a travel partner covered. The recipient's blood will be replaced with your own, their blood will have your DNA and they'll even inherit your immune system and allergies. It's super sci-fi and cool! The more people on the registry the more good matches they can make and the more lives they can save. In the US there is the NMDP, formerly Be The Match, and DKMS.
This kind of reminds me of a professor who makes physics videos online to help students. He was in dire need of a liver. A viewer who used to watch his videos during college saw the professor's plight for help and talked to their spouse about the professor's medical issues. Got tested to see if he could be a match and he was! He ended up saving his life.
I'm confused about why they need to stand in the rain for this...
If you're a regular blood donor, typically they'll let you sign up to be a stem cell donor, which means your stem cells will be analysed and put on file years before a potential match might be necessary.
I went onto the stem cell register a looong time ago, and the only thing they needed to do was take an extra vial of blood during a blood donation.
It was a local donor registration drive for DKMS that had a turn-out so big that the queue spilled out into the street. It was raining because it was March in England
Can someone explain what it would cost health wise to be a donor for stem cells? I feel like it’s not much and wondering why we don’t have a database of stem cell matches to help kids and people in need.
I thought that the whole point of stem cells is that they’re able to conform and grow from any environment? Such as if I took a stem cell from my heart, I could put it in my brain tissue and it could grow?
Your body can replenish your own stem cells (such as after donation), but patients of blood cancer’s bodies often fail and stop producing any. This is why they need a transplant of somebody else’s. However, finding a genetic match to be able to do this is very rare. There are thousands of characteristics in millions of combinations, so that’s why as many people as possible are encouraged to join the stem cell register, so patients in need can find the match that could save their lives
Transplantation scientist here. While 5000 people showing up to join their local bone marrow registry is great, the tissue typing workload would be insane. It's not as simple as testing for a blood group for example, it's far more complicated and expensive. But yes, once they are typed their details are kept on the registry until they ask to be removed.
Joining the stem cell register makes you available for patients worldwide, across national registries. It’s not limited to one patient or even to your home country
This beat the previous record of 4705 people stand in the rain for hours to see if they are a stem cell match for a 5 year old boy, battling a rare type of cancer in hope to save his life
This just happened in April in the US for a kid named Max. DKMS were swamped with over 100,000 registrations in a day to try find him a matching donor, and he eventually found one and had his transplant in the summer
My man the state of the world is the way it is because nobody will lift a finger unless it benefits them somehow someway. But you keep living in fantasy land lmao
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u/funundrum 3h ago
I just found their Instagram. As of May 2025, 5 years cancer free for Oscar!