Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide (BMDW) is an organization based in Leiden, Netherlands

Netherlands

The Netherlands is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, located mainly in North-West Europe and with several islands in the Caribbean. Mainland Netherlands borders the North Sea to the north and west, Belgium to the south, and Germany to the east, and shares maritime borders...

, that coordinates the collection of the HLA phenotypes of volunteer hematopoietic cell donors and cord blood

Cord blood

Umbilical cord blood is blood that remains in the placenta and in the attached umbilical cord after childbirth. Cord blood is collected because it contains stem cells which can be used to treat hematopoietic and genetic disorders.-Collection:...

 units.

BMDW participants (as of September 2011) are 65 hematopoietic cell donor registries from 47 countries, and 47 cord blood bank

Cord blood bank

A cord blood bank is a facility which stores umbilical cord blood for future use. Both private and public cord blood banks have developed since the mid- to late-1990s in response to the potential for cord blood transplants in treating diseases of the blood and immune systems.Public banks accept...

s from 28 countries.

BMDW has the largest on-line database with 18 million stem cell donors and 500,000 cord blood units, which is search-able for authorized transplanting physicians and search coordinators. There are currently 778 users from 489 organizations authorized to perform online searches of registries and cord blood banks participating with the BMDW.

BMDW

Started in 1988 with its office in Leiden (the Netherlands), the BMDW Editorial Board consists of one representative of each stem cell

Stem cell

This article is about the cell type. For the medical therapy, see Stem Cell TreatmentsStem cells are biological cells found in all multicellular organisms, that can divide and differentiate into diverse specialized cell types and can self-renew to produce more stem cells...

donor registry or cord blood bank participating in BMDW, and meets twice a year to discuss achievements and necessary improvements.

BMDW is a service provided and managed by Europdonor Foundation.

Mission statement

BMDW is a voluntary collaborative effort of stem cell donor registries and cord blood banks whose goal is to provide centralized information on the HLA phenotypes and other relevant data of unrelated stem cell donors and cord blood units and to make this information easily accessible to the physicians of patients in need of a hematopoietic stem cell transplant.

Main Goals

The original goal to collect the HLA phenotypes of volunteer stem cell donors and cord blood units, and to co-ordinate their worldwide distribution remain our primary goals. But new initiatives have been added:

• To maximize the chance of finding a stem cell donor or cord blood unit by providing access to all stem cell donors and cord blood units available in the world.
• To minimize the effort required for stem cell donor or cord blood unit searches: only registries with potential stem cell donors or cord blood units need to be contacted.
• To provide an estimate of the chance of finding a stem cell donor or cord blood unit for a given patient.
• To provide advanced search programs to identify partially matched stem cell donors or cord blood units.
• To facilitate search advice requests via the Internet.
• To facilitate improvements in family search strategies.
• To provide relevant general information for the benefit of the patient.
• To provide statistics on the increase of different registries, the number of DNA typed donors, etc.