History & Overview
The Gift of Life Bone Marrow Foundation was established in 1991 as a donor recruitment organization to help save the life of New Jersey leukemia patient Jay Feinberg. Between 1991-95, the organization launched an ambitious grassroots campaign to recruit donors of Eastern-European Jewish ethnicity throughout North America and abroad.Over the course of four years, 60,000 donors registered with the National Marrow Donor Program in the United States, as well as other national registries in Canada, Israel and many other countries through Gift of Life's campaign.
In 1995, the very last donor tested turned out to be Jay's match, and he was transplanted in Seattle at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center. Although it started as a grassroots effort to save one life, the campaign facilitated transplants for hundreds of other patients also in need of donors.
Gift of Life's mission did not end with Jay's successful transplant. The organization is as vibrant and dynamic today as the day it was founded. Today, Gift of Life manages a registry of over 120,000 bone marrow donors and a bank of over 800 umbilical cord blood units. Since 1991, Gift of Life has facilitated transplants for over 1,500 patients in need, over 400 of them from 2002-2007 alone. During that same time period, Gift of Life made 4,400 matches and processed 18,100 searches for patients worldwide. One in 1,000 of the donors in Gift of Life's registry are called to donate their marrow or blood stem cells each year, a statistic that exceeds by twofold the international average.
Gift of Life is an associate donor registry of the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) and a participating member of the worldwide registry Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide. In addition to its accreditation from the NMDP for its Marrow Donor Registry, Gift of Life's Cord Blood Program at UMass is accredited by the American Association of Blood Banks (AABB). Gift of Life also holds state tissue banking licenses required for its activities.
Gift of Life has been a leader in the world of donor registries. It was the first to: utilize bloodless (buccal swab) testing routinely at donor recruitment drives; launch an online registration system for donors to join the registry; establish a Jewish umbilical cord blood bank; establish a donor registry dedicated to recruitment in the Jewish community; develop a secure online system that made it possible for transplant centers and international registries to search and request donors realtime for their patients; fully type donors on a routine basis; become a domestic associate donor registry of the National Marrow Donor Program; establish formal recruitment partnerships with Jewish campus groups, making the recruitment priority to enroll younger donors who will remain in the registry longer, facilitating more transplants over time. Many other registries and recruitment groups have followed Gift of Life's lead by adopting its ideas and initiatives, and many have come to Gift of Life in order to seek advise, train with its leadership and take Gift of Life's strategies home with them to implement in their own communities around the world. Gift of Life is proud to share its expertise with worldwide registries for the benefit of patients everywhere.
Gift of Life has been publicly recognized for its achievements and work helping the Jewish community. Most notably, Gift of Life's founder, Jay Feinberg, is the inagural recipient of the Charles Bronfman Prize and the National Marrow Donor Program's Allison Atlas Award. Jay is also the recipient of the Hadassah International World Citizenship Award. Most recently, Jay recieved an Honorary Doctorate from Yeshiva University with Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.
