Sofia Cantú Sauceda 
Draya Rios/THE RIDER
The National Marrow Donor Program, formerly Be The Match, hosted a registration drive on the Edinburg campus last week to encourage UTRGV students to sign up for the marrow donation registry list.
The Brownsville campus registration drive will take place from 1o a.m. to 4 p.m. Nov. 3 and 4 in the Main Building courtyard.
Shelby Rios, member recruitment coordinator for the program, said it is a non-profit organization to help blood cancer and disorders patients find potential stem cell donors.
“We have been doing this for over 10 years at UTRGV,” Rios said. “We come every semester.”
She said the goal of coming to the university is because of “health disparities” in the Hispanic community.
“Unfortunately, all ethnic minorities, including Hispanics, have less than 50% chance to find a donor match,” Rios said.
Leticia Mondragon, account manager for South and Central Texas, said the organization is a patient’s “last chance for survival.”
“Every three minutes, someone is diagnosed with life-threatening blood cancer,” Mondragon said. “So, it’s really important that we give hope to our blood-cancer patients because only 70% of them need to find, for a second chance at life, an unrelated donor.”
She said NMDP wants to encourage students to donate because they can save a life in the community and around the world.
“We love the Vaqueros here at UTRGV,” Mondragon said. “We’ve had so many successful drives here, and I think this is a community that wants to give back.”
She said bone marrow donation has a lot of misconceptions of being painful.
“But, that is only less than 10% [of the procedure],” Mondragon said. “It’s very similar to double red blood donation, platelet or plasma donation.”
Rios said when people sign up, they get added to NMDP’s national registry and stay there until they are matched with a patient.
“Then, we ask them to go on to donate,” she said. “… They have the choice to say yes or no. If they say yes, they go ahead and do that donation, which may be the only person’s match.”
Leslie Martinez, biomedical sciences senior and president of the NMDP chapter at UTRGV, said she became motivated to donate after talking to Rios.
“I can potentially save those … with cancer, blood disorders and leukemia, which made me very surprised because most of the cancer [procedures] I hear … is chemotherapy,” Martinez said.
She said she registered for marrow donations at a registration drive on campus and “ever since that day, it’s changed my life.”
Martinez added she understands if people are “iffy” about registering because it is not something a lot of people know about.
“Give it a chance because you never know,” she said. “… Those who sign up could potentially save others.”
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