Swabbing for life in the Union

In January of 2009, a Pitt alumnus in his third year of Yale Law School noticed a couple of… In January of 2009, a Pitt alumnus in his third year of Yale Law School noticed a couple of lumps in his groin. Four months later, doctors diagnosed him with a rare form of leukemia known as T-cell lymphoblastic lymphoma.

Seun Adebiyi, who graduated from Pitt in 2006, received a life-saving cord blood transplant from the umbilical cord of a Nigerian couple’s baby a year ago. He received the transplant as part of his cancer treatment — the stem cells in umbilical cord blood help generate new bone marrow and healthy blood in the person who receives them.

“If someone turns out to be a donor for someone, they might be the only person in the world that is able to match the patient,” Adebiyi said. “I know that if the Nigerian couple wouldn’t have decided to donate cord blood, I would have died because there was no one else.”

Adebiyi survived his fight with lymphoma and is training to become the first Nigerian to participate in the Winter Olympics, focusing on the skeleton. He now spends his time advocating for DKMS, the world’s largest bone marrow transplant and donation center.

Pitt’s Nursing Student Association will hold its second “Get Swabbed Drive” with DKMS today and Wednesday from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. in the William Pitt Union.

At the drive, potential donors will swab their own cheek with a long Q-tip to test their eligibility. They will also fill out a registration form to be placed on the DKMS registry.

Junior nursing students Colleen Vogelman, Jarae Payne, Olivia Cimba and Jenny Gutauskas organized the event. All four are members of the Nursing Student Association.

The cheek swab identifies a person’s human leukocyte antigen, a protein on the body’s cells that allows the immune system to recognize the cells as its own, Payne said.

“What we’re making everyone know is that this is a registry drive,” Cimba said. “You’ll be on a list, and at any time you can say you don’t want to be on it.”

Kelly Taylor, a member of DKMS’s donor recruitment team, said that, as of this past September, DKMS has made it a full-time effort to “be very active and reaching out to colleges and doing donor drives.”

Taylor said that almost half of the people who go on to donate marrow registered and went to drives between the ages of 18 and 22.

“Doctors want the young, healthy donors,” Taylor said. “We have the numbers that really prove it. College drives are the best.”

Once on the list, a potential donor can get a call if he or she ever matches a specific patient in need of a transplant. Patients often have leukemia, lymphoma or other blood disorders.

“It’s a big commitment, a big personal choice,” Cimba said.

Willing donors will be asked to undergo one of two different procedures — peripheral blood stem cell donations, known as PBSC, or bone marrow donation.

Payne, the event’s co-coordinator, said the procedures come with “very small” risks.

Taylor compared PBSC donation to donating blood platelets: A needle is put in one arm and the removed blood goes through a machine that filters out the stem cells. It then passes the filtered blood back into the body through a needle placed in the other arm.

“It takes four to eight hours,” Taylor said. “People sometimes compare it to giving blood, but it’s definitely more involved.”

For four days leading up to the donation, donors are givin protein injections. Taylor said donors report experiencing flu-like symptoms for those four days that subside after the blood drawing.

“College kids tell me it’s like a four-day hangover,” Taylor said.

The second method — bone marrow extraction, an out-patient procedure — happens less frequently, she said.

Doctors put a hollow needle into the back of the pelvic bone and remove cells in an hour-long process.

“Donors are placed under anesthesia so they don’t feel anything during the procedure,” Taylor said. “Donors do report lower back pain for about two weeks afterwards. It’s why people get so freaked out, and ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ doesn’t really help our cause.”

Taylor said patients diagnosed with a blood disease have a four in 10 chance that they will find someone on the registry.

“Students need to remember you’re declining this one person who has a minimal chance of finding another donor,” Cimba said.

Tissue type has a lot to do with ethnicity, Taylor said. All minority groups are currently underrepresented on the donor list.

“This is another reason we like doing college drives,” Taylor said. “It represents a diverse group — the student body.”

Last year 373 students registered at Pitt’s drive. Of those, five students have received calls as potential matches, and one has gone on to donate.

Junior Katie Karaffa received a phone call last week saying that her tissue type matched a patient in need of bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cells. She was swabbed at last year’s drive.

Karaffa is currently undergoing the donation process that could take up to three months, she said.

“If you can help save a life, I think it’s totally worth it,” Karaffa said. “The first part is just drawing blood, and if you donate bone marrow it’s just like you fall and slip on the ice.”