Twitter helps Leukemia sufferer find a match in 2 weeks

About two weeks ago I saw a Twitter message from colleague Steve Duplessie of Enterprise Strategy Group. Steve is usually riffing on the enterprise IT marketplace — and particularly storage — over at his IT Rants blog. My attention was piqued by his Twitter message — he asked his followers to pass on a message about a Leukemia sufferer looking for a particular type of match. I immediately re-tweeted.

The sufferer, Nick Glasgow, is a 28-year old employee of EMC. His VP of Marketing, Mark Fredrickson, put out a note — which Steve picked up, and I picked up — and hundreds more picked up via Twitter and other social mediums.

Turns out there’s some potentially good news in just two weeks.

Mark from EMC writes:

We learned yesterday afternoon that Stanford Cancer Center has found two donor matches for Nick out of the thirteen potential matches that had been developed by the national registry. Human leukocytes antigen (HLA) typing is used to match patients and donors for transplants. The immune system uses these antigens (markers) to recognize which cells belong in your body and which do not. Stanford was searching for a set of ten markers for the best match. Each of the two donor matches that were discovered, match ten out of ten criterion markers. Further evaluation needs to occur on the two donors by Stanford before a final selection can be made. Moreover, up until the actual transplant event, the national registry will continue to search for other possible donors that might make an even better match.

In any event it looks like Nick is going to get his chance at a transplant procedure which is heartening indeed for all of us. Nick and his family are so very grateful to all those people behind the scenes at EMC, as well as the other large companies that joined in, The Asian-American Donor Program, the Be The Match Donor Program, all the media involved, and the Stanford/Kaiser medical teams that have helped bring about this hopeful development. We are equally thankful for all of the outpouring of personal support by individuals all over this land and around the globe for their good wishes, prayers, support, and for all the donor volunteers who have come forward this past month.

Excellent, excellent news. I hope it all goes well for Nick. This is a super example of how personal social media really can be influential in making the world a smaller, personal place.

You can find out more about bone marrow matching here: http://www.marrow.org/.