Bone marrow donation: new recruitment campaign for the Biomedicine Agency

While more than nine out of ten people have heard of bone marrow donation, only one out of three would be able to clearly explain how it works. The Biomedicine Agency is therefore aware that “While bone marrow donation is better known and understood, questions remain.”

This is why it is once again launching its recruitment campaign with the aim of making this gift better understood by the general public, but also diversifying the profile of donors.

Three priority areas: “masculine, rejuvenate and diversify” the donor register

The objective of this campaign, which will end next September on the occasion of World Bone Marrow Donation Day, is therefore threefold:

• To rejuvenate the age of the donors, which must anyway be between 18 and 35 years old, for two reasons. “Grafts from young people are the ones that give the best chance to patients, because they are richer in hematopoietic stem cells (blood cells produced by the bone marrow), which promotes graft take. In addition, a donor is contacted on average 8 years after his registration in the register: the earlier he registers, the more likely he is to be solicited and to be able to help a patient. recalls the Biomedicine Agency;
• Masculinize the national register, because it has only 36% of men, while more than 70% of the donors of bone marrow taken are men. “A proportion that must be significantly increased” notes the Agency. Indeed, “transplant doctors have found that a transplant performed from a sample of bone marrow cells from a male donor improves the patient’s chances of successful transplant. This is explained by immunological factors: antibodies, absent in men and naturally developed by women during pregnancy (even if it is not carried to term), complicate the appropriation of the bone marrow graft from the donor by the patient”;
• Diversify the donor profile: a bone marrow transplant requires finding a donor compatible with the patient, i.e. “someone whose immunological identity card is as identical as possible to that of the sick person. Each person has their own genetic profile, determined in part by their origins and family genetic history. It is therefore essential that the register reflect the diversity of the origins of the French population and therefore of the patients. she still thinks.

A registration to become a “Watcher of life”

The Biomedicine Agency therefore wishes to mobilize this type of profile, men aged 18 to 35, representative of diversity, to complete its registers and “join the large community of donors, these “Lifeguards” who can be called upon at any time to save a life“.

The awareness campaign will take the form of a film broadcast on social networks but also posters pasted near certain places such as universities. Audio spots will also be broadcast on streaming listening platforms and some community radio stations.