Ridgewood H.S. Alumni Anthony Daniels
Is Looking for His Perfect Match

December 21, 2013

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Three years ago, at age 19, Anthony Daniels, a 2009 Ridgewood High School graduate, was diagnosed with Hodgkin�s Lymphoma. Today, 22-year-old Anthony is in need of a life-giving bone marrow stem cell transplant to cure the disease he�s been fighting so valiantly.

Anthony has continued his cancer treatments at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in New York City while attending Fordham University�s Gabelli School of Business. But Anthony now needs an allogenic transplant; he must find a donor outside of his family who is a match and can donate white blood cells essential for his recovery. What makes Anthony�s search more difficult is that less than 1% of the population will match Anthony�s DNA markers.

The HLA Registry at Community Blood Services, with the help of Anthony�s friends and family in his hometown of Ridgewood, will try to find a match for Anthony and other patients like him by holding a bone marrow drive on Saturday, December 21 from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Ridgewood Town Hall, 131 North Maple Avenue, to register potential bone marrow donors to the national Be The Match Registry.

The public is urged to take 10 minutes to join the national Be The Match bone marrow registry through The HLA Registry by getting a simple cheek swab and filling out a short form. To register you just need to be 18-44 years of age and be willing to donate for any patient in the world.

You can also click here to register online at a virtual drive for Anthony at bethematch.org. Use promo code AnthonyDaniels. If you can�t register but wish to help in another way, you can help fund the family�s efforts by sending in a contribution to help defer the cost of adding new members to the registry. A check can be made out to the Be The Match Registry and mailed to The HLA Registry, 102 Chestnut Ridge Road, Montvale, NJ 07645. Every $100 raised helps add a member to the registry.

Every day, thousands of adults and children like Anthony are diagnosed with lymphoma, aplastic anemia, leukemia, sickle cell anemia and other serious diseases that require stem cell transplants as a cure. Like Anthony, 70 percent of those patients will not find matches within their own families and must turn to the national registry to find a donor match.

ABOUT THE HLA REGISTRY

The HLA Registry (HLA stands for human leukocyte antigens, the genetic information encoded on white blood cells) at Community Blood Services is dedicated to finding compatible unrelated donors for lifesaving bone marrow transplants. A member of the NMDP based in Montvale (NJ), it is the largest non-governmental donor center in the U.S. and has registered more than 230,000 potential donors in the NMDP�s data base.