Marrow Drive Rochester
Inspired by affection and respect for Peter Ciaccia, a Pittsford businessman, a number of his friends created Marrow Drive Rochester (MDR), which is an organization dedicated to assisting individuals like Peter who are in need of bone marrow or stem cell transplants.
Each year approximately 30,000 people are diagnosed with conditions for which a bone marrow or blood stem cell transplant represents the only possible life-saving cure. About 70% of those individuals do not have a suitable donor within their own family and must find an unrelated matched donor.
This is where the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) comes in, which is an organization that maintains a donor registry of over 5 million individuals who have committed to donating their marrow or blood stem cells to any patient in the world for whom they are a match. But despite the existence of 5 million ready donors, the immense diversity in the population is such that those with rarer tissue traits – which includes many thousands of people each year – cannot find a match in the registry and die waiting. Which is why it is the specific goal of MDR to recruit more potential donors, and thereby enlarge and diversify the registry maintained by the NMDP.
The Friends of Peter Ciaccia Golf Tournament, which took place on June 14th, was the first of two fundraisers we are conducting to finance what we hope will be a very large bone marrow drive. For the second fundraiser, which will take place on July 9th, MDR has teamed up with the Rochester Raging Rhinos soccer organization to attempt to break into the Guinness Book of World Records by conducting the largest pillow fight in recorded history after that night’s game at Frontier Field.
And then it all culminates with the bone marrow drive on July 21st at the St. Louis Church in Pittsford. We are also looking at the possibility of an additional site for the bone marrow drive at a yet-to-determined location in the City of Rochester in late July.
If you would like to get involved in this worthy cause, we would love to have you. We need individual volunteers to help out at the pillow fight event, corporate sponsors and ticket sellers for that pillow fight event, as well as individuals that can help us get the word out about the bone marrow drive on July 21st. And, of course, we hope that you will consider joining the registry yourself by attending our bone marrow drive, and that you will encourage those you know to do the same.
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To add more volunteers to the National Marrow Donor Program Registry in hopes that we can save lives.
