Stem Cell Club

Stem Cell Club is a donor recruitment organization in Canada which works to address racial disparity in access to matched unrelated stem cell donors. We run stem cell drives to register Canadians (especially those from diverse backgrounds) as potential stem cell donors. We seek to raise awareness and educate about stem cell donation, and to contribute to the development of a culture of donation in Canada. Many patients with blood, immune, or metabolic diseases need a stem cell transplantation as part of their treatment. The majority of those patients do not have a suitable fully-matched donor in their family, and are in need of an unrelated donor. Despite over 400,000 Canadians (and over 36 million around the world) registered as potential stem cell donors, many patients cannot find a matched donor for them. This is especially true for patients from diverse ethnic/racial groups: Caucasian people have a ~75% chance of finding a matched unrelated donor, but most ethnic/racial groups have a much lower chance (as low as 15% chance to find a match for some ancestral groups).