Amit Gupta Needs You

Ekta Doshi is in her mid-thirties and has CLL. She’s been searching for a matched donor for quite a while, she was diagnosed in 2011. Tragically, despite a recent 9/10 match, she will not be receiving a transplant. The matched person would not agree to donate, and now Ekta has to continue her search. 

As Amit’s friends and family who have been through this process first hand, this news breaks our hearts. 

Please do everything you can to share the truth about what marrow donation is, so that no one who needs a transplant has live with the horrible knowledge that there is a known match for them who has chosen not to help save their life. 

Read more about Etka’s story here. 

If you would be a willing donor, register. 

And please, share this story in the hopes we can keep it from repeating! 

While Amit continues to recover from the bone marrow transplant process, it’s important to remember that the need for minority donors still exists. The struggle to find a donor is not over for thousands of minority patients every year who find themselves in similar circumstances. 

http://www.cheekswab.org/ is a new website that’s launched in the last two weeks in hopes of putting together some information to better inform prospective donors about the need, process, and experience of both joining the registry and donating bone marrow. Please visit cheekswab.org to learn more, and remember to sign up for a donor kit if you haven’t already! Spreading awareness is the first step to saving lives!

There have been a lot of questions about what’s going on with Amit now that our deadline has passed. (Nov 30th — chosen based on Amit’s doctor’s optimal treatment schedule and the amount of time it takes the NMDP to process and make a swab available to search.)

In short, we wait.

In the meantime, Amit will receive chemotherapy while his doctors work to identify and confirm a potential donor. We hope he’s able to have a transplant early next year.

Although samples collected from here on out will probably not be a part of his search, Amit and everyone else who has been working so hard on this project encourage you to continue to spread the word about the cause.

Please, tell your friends and family about the need for marrow donation. There are hundreds of patients waiting for a transplant.

Every person you add to the registry could be the match that saves a life. 

We’re incredibly appreciative. This site is brand-new so we’re still working out a few kinks and finishing up some pages.

A HUGE thanks to David Cole and Tag Savage for pulling an all-nighter to design it!

Following his week-long induction chemotherapy, Amit’s family got the results of his first bone marrow test today, and it’s clean!

He’ll be having another test in two weeks, and if that’s clean too, it’s a great sign and it means treatment can proceed as planned.