Gift of Life Australia’s vision is a world in which no person dies from blood-related diseases due the existence of global stem cell registries that comprehensively represent all ethnicities and provide with near-certainty the promise of a stem cell match and subsequent cure.
Gift of Life Australia’s mission is:
i. To raise awareness of the life saving potential of stem cell, bone marrow and cord blood transplants.
ii. To encourage as many people as possible aged 18–35 yrs to register with Stem Cell Donors Australia.
iii. To increase the representation of those ethnic communities under-represented on the Stem Cell Donors Australia register.
Tissue type is inherited. A patient’s best chance of finding a genetic match lies with those in their immediate family or with those of similar ethnic ancestry. Less than one third of patients find a relative whose tissue matches theirs; the balance need to find an unrelated donor within their ethnic community (preferably in Australia) to increase their chance of survival.
There are currently thousands of people in Australia, and many more worldwide, diagnosed with life-threatening blood diseases such as leukaemia and aplastic anaemia for whom a stem cell transplant is their only chance of survival. To say that there is an urgent need for volunteer potential donors from the general community, particularly those ethnic communities under-represented on the registry, is a dramatic understatement.
