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Gilda's Club Hosting Large Bone Marrow Drive

Prominent Support Group Invoking Holiday Spirit and Friendship to Save Lives

Rochester, NY, December 7, 2005 – Gilda’s Club Rochester, a support organization for those living with cancer and their families, announced today that it will be conducting a large bone marrow drive to recruit potential bone marrow and stem cell donors. The bone marrow drive will occur on December 10, 2005, between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., at the group’s headquarters at 255 Alexander Street, Rochester, NY.

The bone marrow drive is in honor of thirteen members of Gilda’s Club who are all living with cancer and may someday require a bone marrow transplant. The theme of the bone marrow drive is that when people get cancer, their friends always say: “if there’s anything I can ever do…” Now there is. By getting tested at the bone marrow drive and joining the national registry, participants can utilize their unique tissue traits to strike back at cancer, and hopefully deny it additional victims.

“Thousands of people die every year because there are not enough potential bone marrow donors registered with the National Marrow Donor Program,” said Steve Stello, an organizer of the event and a board member at Gilda’s Club Rochester. “This holiday season we are asking the community to join the registry and potentially give the gift of life.”

In order to get into the registry, a simple fingerstick test will be used to take a small sample of blood from the potential donor. There is no cost for someone to be tested and to join the registry. Participants should expect to spend twenty and thirty minutes at the bone marrow drive for processing. Gilda’s Club has teamed up with Marrow Drive Rochester, a local group that conducts and assists with bone marrow drives, for organizational and financial support. More information about bone marrow and stem cell transplants can be found on Marrow Drive Rochester’s website: www.marrowdrive.org.

About Gilda’s Club Rochester

When Gilda Radner, in treatment for advanced ovarian cancer, visited a cancer support community in Los Angeles, she suddenly discovered that she was not alone. She found she shared the same fears that no one, not even caring family and friends, could possibly understand. By sharing her confusion about treatments, relationships, sexuality; and the thousands of other challenges faced by other people with cancer, Gilda reclaimed her sense of humor, the essence of which had never deserted her. As she put it, "I joined an elite club that I'd rather not belong to." Gilda's Club started with that wonderful play on Groucho Marx's famous quip. In voicing it, Gilda captured the unique combination of camaraderie, friendship, humor, ambiguity, fear and hope that arises when people face cancer in our community - whether they are a person with cancer, family member or friend. A "clubhouse" where men, women and children share their hopes and fears, wisdom and information, learning together how to live with cancer, whatever the outcome, provides the warm and welcoming site of the cancer support community that is now part of Gilda Radner's legacy. www.gildasclubrochester.org

About Marrow Drive Rochester

Inspired by affection and respect for Rochester native Peter Ciaccia, who is currently undergoing a bone marrow transplant, Marrow Drive Rochester (MDR) was created in 2004 as 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.

For more information visit: www.marrowdrive.org