By Kassandra Reyes
Millions of people around the world are affected by cancer directly or indirectly. Texas A&M University has an organization dedicated to educating others about certain types of cancers with hard-to-find cures — specifically, those with blood diseases.
Founded in 2012, Be The Match at Texas A&M aims to raise awareness on bone marrow donations and transplants, recruit people for the bone marrow registry, host bone marrow drives, raise funds, and continue to expand their numbers and potential donors. In their first year, Be The Match had about 10 members. Today, the organization has doubled in size with a variety of leadership positions and opportunities. The president of the organization, Gabe Escobedo, has a plan for this relatively new organization.
Each semester, Be The Match has a bone marrow drive at Rudder Plaza with the hopes of recruiting at least 50 people, not just students, for the bone marrow registry. This means 50 more potential matches for patients in need of a hero.
“It’s very rare that somebody is a match,” Escobedo says. “That’s why we want more and more people to get on the registry to make it more likely that somebody will be a match.”
Patients fighting leukemia, lymphoma, and other blood diseases depend on these bone marrow or cord blood transplants to be their cure. According to the national Be The Match website, 70 percent of patients who need a transplant cannot look within their family for a match. This is why Be The Match, locally and nationally, urges all people to sign up for the registry for the chance to save a life.
It is a difficult and rare thing to be perfect — a perfect match that is. There are a lot of parameters one person must fit in order to qualify for a match, so much so, that out of nearly 1,000 people Be The Match at Texas A&M has added to the national registry, only 20 have proven to be the match. “It’s very very rare. That’s why the more people we get on the registry, the better chances people have,” Escobedo urges.
So how do you become the match? The process all begins with registration. Anyone can sign up, and signing up is easy! It only takes a few minutes. However, there is a two-week waiting period to officially get on the national registry. Donors are given a swab kit to swab the inside of their cheek, which will then get sent to a lab for further analysis into the matching process. Then comes the waiting, followed by a call notifying the person whether or not they have proven to be a match. If a match is not found right away, the donor is still kept on the registry for future patients. Escobedo says the process is easy and quick, which is why Be The Match tries to educate the community on how easily one person can save someone else’s life.
Nationally, Be The Match has facilitated more than 80,000 marrow and cord blood transplants, with nearly 6,200 transplants a year. “As the recognized leader in unrelated marrow transplantation, Be The Match continues to develop services and interactive technologies used by transplant experts around the world to reach more patients,” the national Be The Match website reports.
At Texas A&M, Escobedo says he hopes Be The Match continues to grow and attract people in the Bryan College Station community in hopes of recruiting potential matches.
For more information, visit the national website for Be The Match at www.bethematch.org.
