Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that adequate numbers of donors are available for patients requiring a stem cell transplant.

Since 2011 the Department has provided more than £26 million in financial support to NHS Blood and Transplant (NHSBT) and Anthony Nolan to enable improved provision of stem cells for patients requiring a transplant, supporting the recruitment and management of donors.

Departmental funding has also enabled the establishment of a unified stem cell registry for the United Kingdom, the ‘Anthony Nolan and the NHS Stem Cell Registry’. There are now 1.4 million potential donors on the UK’s aligned registry.

Each of the UK’s stem cell registries that collectively form the ‘Anthony Nolan and the NHS Stem Cell Registry’ is a member of the World Marrow Donor Association (WMDA) – a group of organisations and individuals who promote global collaboration and best practices for the benefit of stem cell donors and transplant patients.

The WMDA’s ‘Search and Match Service’ is a global database of life-saving donors that provides a fast search facility to find the best matched donor or cord blood unit in the world for a patient in need of a blood stem cell transplant.