Any healthy person can donate stem cell. Stem cell is the 'mother' cell that can birth various other types of cells. There are various types of stem cells. For example, hematopoietic stem cells in bone marrow develop into various blood cells: red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets. Stem cells are also self-replicating: they can produce copies of themselves. 

For patients like Stella who has blood disorder, receiving stem cell transplant is often the only treatment, although not a cure. For Stella, transplant happened on December 20th of 2024 (Life Day). This was done after a week of chemotherapy to remove all her existing blood cells and stem cells. Once all existing ones were killed by chemo, she received the stem cells on life day, and we waited for the new stem cell to settle in (engraftment). Luckily, engraftment was successful and we were able to head home after waiting about a month. 

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You can register as a potential stem cell donor to help others like Stella. Registering as a donor puts your HLA type information (kind of like blood type but there are tens of thousands of types) on the registry. Patients like Stella looking for stem cell transplant search a match from the registry. If there is a match (which is low chance), then next steps can take place. The potential donor will go through more test to see if the two are indeed a match. If you are indeed a match, then the donation can proceed.

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Stella's donor was Victoria, who is my wife, Stella's mom. We could not find a match for her from the registry. Victoria was only a haploid match (50% HLA match) which is usually not a good enough match for most transplants. But for SCID patients, this is usually okay because SCID patients don't have T and B cells. Their immune system can't fight off donor's cells. This is usually not good (because you want your immune system to fight off intruders), but in this case it works out for our case. We are thankful that out of all the blood disease, she has a blood disease that was treatable with one of our (Stella's mom or dad) stem cells.

However, most of other blood diseases are not like SCID. There are other babies and patients who are still waiting for a perfect match from the stem cell registry. We want to help them. That is why we made this page. This is why we decided to celebrate Stella's Life Day and raise awareness of SCID and Stem Cell Donation. Please consider joining the donor registry. Join Team Stella by clicking the following button!