ABOUT US - A MESSAGE FROM OUR FOUNDER
My wife and I were absolutely devastated when our daughter, Natasha, developed leukemia. Even though I had spent most of my life being trained as a cancer researcher, serving on the board of the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society and working for a major drug company, I did not know what isn't taught. Over the next few years, we learned a lot about the strengths and weaknesses of her treatment. We now know that your chance for a cure is often directly related to your ability to quickly find a "perfectly matched" donor in the NMDP registry.
Since Natasha was of mixed heritage it was impossible to find a perfectly matched or even a partially matched donor in the registry. A high percentage of minorities and a lower, but still troublesome, percentage of whites also face this harsh reality (click here to see the statistics). |
| We found it equally impossible to find a match in the general population - we registered thousands of potential bone marrow donors without even finding a single, partial match. All seemed lost until her doctors decided to go with a newer procedure when they found two frozen cord blood units that partially matched her. Natasha, as a result, became the first adult cancer patient to receive a cord blood transplant in Kentucky.
Natasha’s cord blood transplant and recovery offered few complications, and she walked out of the hospital in less than a week. More importantly, it gave her an opportunity to pursue her dream of becoming a doctor at Yale School of Medicine. |
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She suffered a relapse in her second semester and finished her first year of medical school taking chemo treatments while the entire school looked for a donor. Yale did not perform cord blood transplants but was able to find a partially matched bone marrow donor. Natasha underwent the bone marrow transplant and died of "graft versus host disease" one month later.
Become My Hero's mission was originally created to find my daughter a bone marrow donor. I refined it after she died to give two of her Yale schoolmates an alternative to either dying because they are not able to find a donor or from graft-versus-host disease.
A group of like-minded people have since structured the National Mixed Heritage Stem Cell Foundation as a formal 501c3 organization to manage the day-to-day operation of Become My Hero and bring in the talent, expertise and funds that are required to help those in need. Eleven and one half percent of the approximately 4,050 Americans who annually search for a bone marrow donor can't find one in a registry. This means that currently more than 450 Americans suffer and die a brutal death each year while desperately searching for a bone marrow donor that is never found.
I truly thank the board members and executive director (click here to see leadership summary) of this organization for picking up where I left off and honoring Natasha's desire to help others. I will remain their most ardent advocate and spokesperson.
Sincerely,
Theodore Collins, Ph.D., M.S., M.A.
