About us

When their 10-year-old daughter Laura was diagnosed with leukemia, Robert Graves, D.V.M., and his wife, Sherry, were ready to do anything they could to save her. Desperate to save her life, they turned to alternative treatment options. They agreed to try the first ever bone marrow transplant for a leukemia patient from an unrelated donor.

Laura received her transplant in 1979. And it worked. The success of the treatment inspired the Graves to give other families the same hope for a cure. Thanks to Dr. Graves, other patient families, doctors, congressional support and funding from the U.S. Navy, a national registry of volunteers willing to donate bone marrow was born.

Many people wondered if anyone would volunteer to donate marrow. Within the first year, the NMDP Registry^SM was established, and an astonishing 10,000 people answered the call. We conducted our first transplant as the National Marrow Donor Program® in 1987, when Diane Walters of Wisconsin donated marrow to 6-year-old Brooke Ward of North Carolina. It wasn’t long before the program took off worldwide from a tiny office at the American Red Cross in St. Paul, Minn.

Beyond establishing the registry, we also invested in medical research to find answers that would save the lives of more patients.

• 1990: Nobel Prize in Medicine awarded to Dr. E. Donnall Thomas for discoveries in cellular transplantation
• 1997: First use of peripheral blood stem cells in NMDP transplants
• 1998: Launched umbilical cord blood transplant program
• 2001: Built the NMDP Research Sample Repository, one of the world’s largest tissue sample storage facilities used for medical research
• 2004: Partnered with the Medical College of Wisconsin to create CIBMTR® (Center for International Blood and Marrow Transplant Research®), our collaborative research program
• 2010: Introduction of haploidentical transplantation protocols, allowing for transplantation from partially matched family donors
• 2012: Completed more than 700 peer-reviewed publications based on research conducted
• 2013: Facilitated more than 2,800 transplants for patients over age 50 (45% of total transplants)
  
• 2015: Expanded donor recruitment efforts to specifically include diverse populations, enhancing the chances of finding matches for patients of all ethnic backgrounds
• 2016: Launched NMDP BioTherapies^SM to extend our services and expertise to organizations developing and delivering cell therapies to help more patients
• 2020: Developed innovative approaches to graft-versus-host disease (GVHD) prevention and treatment, improving post-transplant outcomes for patients
• 2020: Established the NMDP^SM Cryopreservation Service, aimed at providing hematopoietic cell transplant patients, allogeneic blood stem cell donors and physicians with a predictable path to transplant. Through this service, transplant centers can access cryopreservation and storage services for patient-directed donor products at no cost to the patient, donor or transplant center.
• 2023: Announcement of early successes in our groundbreaking NMDP Donor for All initiative, which will expand access to transplant through the use of partially matched donors.

Read more about how we’ve been able to help patients.

Since 1987, we’ve impacted more than 130,000 lives through cell therapy. In 2023, we impacted 7,435 lives—the most in any one year in our history.

As the recognized leader in unrelated blood stem cell transplantation, NMDP continues to develop services and interactive technologies used by transplant experts around the world to reach more patients.

We also continue to lead the way in developing new cell therapies, in advancing services to speed the transplant process and improving treatments for post-transplant complications. We invest in dedicated researchers, whose countless hours in the lab have helped more patients than ever before receive a transplant.

Our commitment to fighting for better outcomes and more lives saved continues.