Youngest Stem Cell Donor at Johns Hopkins Hospital

In a few hours, the tiny pink stem cells I donated were going to save another person’s life. For that, I, a 13-year-old, became the youngest stem cell donor at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

For around six hours, I underwent a procedure called apheresis. For a fancy name, apheresis is actually pretty simple: blood is extracted from one of my arms and filtered through a centrifuge. The desired cells, in this case, hematopoietic progenitor cells (HPC), typically found in peripheral blood, are collected in a bag while the remaining components of the blood are returned to me intravenously in the other arm. HPCs are immature blood cells, an intermediate cell type that develops from hematopoietic stem cells (HSC). My healthy HPC cells are going to be transfused into a leukemia patient’s vein to replace their cancerous cells. Once in the body, these cells know exactly what to do! Some will differentiate into red blood cells, some into white blood cells, and some into platelets.

In people living with acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a type of cancer that affects bone marrow and blood cells, HPCs are overproduced in the bone marrow and do not mature into specific blood cells. These immature blasts hoard nutrients preventing the healthy cells from doing their job.  

Another possible treatment for AML patients is a bone marrow transplant. In this procedure, the donor is knocked out with general anesthesia. Surgeons create tiny holes into the dorsal side of the pelvic bone with a large bore needle to extract bone marrow cells with a syringe. The pelvic bone is the perfect site for harvesting bone marrow because flat bones like this store a considerable amount of marrow. After 1-2 hours, there is usually enough marrow to be shipped off to be processed in a lab and then to the recipient for infusion.

Please join the registry at BetheMatch.org. Just think, by donating some of your healthy stem cells and a few hours of your time, you could become a beacon of hope for a patient battling leukemia. You could give them a chance at life. If anything in this world is a rewarding experience, this would be it!