Mixed Marrow began in 2009 to address a critical gap in bone marrow donor registries. Diversity across national and global registries remained strikingly low, especially for mixed-race patients.
Mixed Marrow
Today, we feature a guest post from Athena Mari Asklipiadis, founder of Mixed Marrow. Her organization works to connect multiethnic patients with compatible bone marrow and blood stem cell donors. Athena also helped produce the 2016 documentary Mixed Match, which encourages mixed-race and minority individuals to register as donors.
Before launching Mixed Marrow, several organizations had already built strong foundations. Groups like Asians for Miracle Marrow Matches (A3M) in Los Angeles and the Asian American Donor Program (AADP) in Alameda spent decades raising awareness in minority communities. Their work highlighted a persistent disparity in donor representation.
Finding Matches
Athena saw an opportunity to expand that effort. She focused on closing the racial gap in registries by using social media as her primary outreach tool.
Genetic matching depends heavily on shared inherited markers. This makes diversity in the donor pool essential. In 2009, mixed-race donors made up less than 3 percent of registered donors. By contrast, Caucasians accounted for roughly 70 percent. Minority groups comprised the remaining share.
These numbers reflected broader population trends, but they exposed a serious problem. Patients from non-white and multiracial backgrounds faced significantly lower odds of finding a match. At the same time, multiracial individuals represented the fastest-growing demographic in the United States.
Diversity Matters
The need for a more diverse donor pool was urgent and clear.
After getting to know a local mixed race searching patient, Krissy Kobata, and hearing of her struggles finding a match, I knew I had to do my best to reach out to fellow multiracial people, most of which were young and likely online. At the time, I was engaged with fellow hapas (half in Hawaiian Pidgin, referring mixed heritage) and mixed people via multiracial community Facebook groups and other internet forums. One common thing I noticed, unlike topics like identity, food and culture– health was definitely not widely talked about. So with that lack of awareness, Mixed Marrow began as a facebook page and later as a website. With the help of organizations like A3M supplying Be The Match testing kits, Mixed Marrow was able to also exist outside of the virtual world by hosting donor recruitment drives at different cultural and college events.
After about a year of advocacy, in 2010, I connected with filmmaker Jeff Chiba Stearns to pitch an idea for a documentary on the patients I worked with. Telling their stories in words and on flyers was not effective enough for me, I felt that more people would be inclined to register as a donor if they got to know the patients as well as I did. Thus, the film Mixed Match was born.
Over the course of the next 6 years, Jeff and I went on a journey across the US to gather not only patient stories, but input from pioneers in stem cell transplantation like Dr. Paul Terasaki and Dr. John E. Wagner. It was so important to share these transplant tales while being as accurate and informed as possible.
Our goal was to educate audiences and present a call-to-action where everyone can learn how they can save a life. Mixed Match not only highlights bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donation, but it also shares the possibilities of umbilical cord stem cells.
Mixed Match director, Jeff Chiba Stearns decided a great way to explain stem cell science and matching was through animation. Stearns, with the help of animator, Kaho Yoshida, was able to reach across to non-medical expert audiences and create digestible and engaging imagery to teach what is usually very complex science.
At every screening we also make sure to host a bone marrow registry drive so audiences have the opportunity to sign up. We have partnered with both the US national registry, Be The Match and Canadian Blood Services’ One Match registry.
Nearly 8 years and about 40 cities later, Mixed Marrow has managed to spread advocacy for the need for more mixed race donors all over the US and even other countries like Canada, Japan, Korea and Austria all the while being completely volunteer-run. It is our hope that through social media and film, Mixed Match, we can help share these important stories and save lives.
Further Information
- Learn more about Mixed Marrow at www.mixedmarrow.org or @mixedmarrow on social media (Twitter and Instagram).
- For more on the documentary Mixed Match and how you can see it, visit www.mixedmatchproject.com or @mixedmatchmovie on social media (Twitter and Instagram).
- Register in the US as a donor by visiting join.bethematch.org/mixedmatch or by checking out our upcoming drives here: www.mixedmatch.org/calendar