How do patients find a matching donor?

How do patients find a matching donor? So when we start to do the transplant workup process, the first thing we have to do is determine a person or a patient's HLA type. So HLA stands for human leukocyte antigen. And basically what that does is it marks your cells as yours. So it's kind of a barcode to determine if a cell is self or yours or foreign, not yours. So we first get the HLA typing for the patient. And then we assess whether they have brothers and sisters. And there is a potential, a possibility that their brother or sister may be a full match, meaning that all of their HLA that we look at are totally the same. There's also a chance that they might be a half match. So about half of the HLA we look at are the same. There's also the chance that they might not have a sibling that matches them at all. And that's okay. There are a tremendous wealth of resources to obtain a donor in the current era. So other ways that we look for donors are parents or potentially children. So parents and children are usually half HLA matches. We call them half-lo identical donors. So that's an option. And then we have the wonderful, the incredible unrelated registries. So by chance, people that you are not related to may have a matching HLA type. That's just from thousands of years of ancestral evolution. So we can also look in the unrelated registries, the national registries, the international registries. And again, by chance, we might find a full HLA match. There's also something called a mismatched donor, which we sometimes pursue. And then we have a whole other layer of umbilical cord donors as well. So for a majority of patients, we are able to identify a donor. It didn't always used to be that way. But because of some of the changes we've made in our transplant regimens, we're able to most cases, which is really a tremendous resource. Some of our patients of certain ethnicities, it is challenging to find donors at times, which is why we encourage, especially our minority populations, to try to get on these unrelated registries. So that's the first part in the donor workup. It's finding a donor. And then once you find a donor, the clock begins, if you will.