In a short period of time, another stem cell donation from the Croatian Registry of voluntary bone marrow donors has been used for a patient suffering from leukemia.
After a match was found in the Croatian Registry and, at the request of the English Registry, Anthony Nolan carried out the procedure of harvesting the matching stem cells, which were delivered to England earlier today. Even though the names of the donor and the recipient of the stem cells are confidential, this is another confirmation of the humanity of the voluntary donors in the Croatian Registry.
Until today, the actions of the Ana Rukavina Foundation have led to almost 33,000 names of potential donors being added to the Registry, of which 12,575 samples have already been tissue typed, and the rest of the samples are still waiting to be tissue typed.
“The dream and promise that Ana made in the last days of her life are being realized exactly the way she had imagined. The news that Croatian donors have saved yet another life has given us great motivation to continue our activities with even more fervor, and especially to tissue type all of the collected blood samples so that the Registry becomes even more operational and has a greater chance of saving a patient’s life,” stressed Marija Rukavina, the director of the Foundation.
The Ana Rukavina Foundation was founded at the beginning of 2007 with the mission of putting in place a system which would serve to expand the Registry of voluntary bone marrow and stem cell donors, and to establish a public cord blood bank. The Ana Rukavina Foundation has continued with its mission of raising funds and employing other resources for the operation and expansion of the Croatian Registry of voluntary bone marrow donors and the work of the Public Cord Blood Bank “Ana Rukavina”.