LOS ANGELES _ Matthew Medina's doctors diagnosed him with a rare blood disease a few months ago and told him he would probably die without a bone marrow transplant.
With that prognosis came another: The 40-year-old Los Angeles police officer had a less than 50 percent chance of finding a donor because he is not white.
Most successful matches for bone marrow transplants involve a donor and patient of the same ethnicity. But the majority of the 25 million registered donors nationwide are white, and Medina is Filipino. So far, no match has been found.
"You're basically looking for a genetic twin," said Athena Mari Asklipiadis, who runs Mixed Marrow, an L.A.-based organization that is trying to increase diversity in the bone marrow donor registry. "It's not like we have more of a chance we would get a disease, or that we're harder to match, it's just that there's not representation in the national registry."
It's a familiar problem for any nonwhite person who has needed a bone marrow transplant.
A white American of European descent has a 75 percent chance of finding a perfect match in the national donor registry, compared with a 40 percent chance for Filipinos. Few Filipinos in the U.S. have signed up as potential donors, and there is no registry in the Philippines.
Researchers are experimenting with ways to perform bone marrow transplants on people who can't find matches. But while those treatments are being perfected, thousands of people are diagnosed every year with leukemia, lymphomas and other blood diseases whose only hope for a cure is a marrow transplant. And for them, it can come down to ethnicity.
Medina's wife, Angelee, has watched dozens of people at sign-up events across Southern California, particularly in the Filipino community, volunteer to donate bone marrow with the hope of curing her husband. "We're very thankful for that," she said. "We're hoping something comes up."
For now, Medina is being kept alive with transfusions.
"All you want is for that loved one to have a chance," said Officer Dante Pagulayan, Medina's partner at the LAPD and a childhood friend. "That's what we're praying for."
