FOR
IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Thursday, September 28, 2006 |
CONTACT:
HRSA PRESS OFFICE
301-443-3376 |
HRSA Awards $50 Million to Improve and Promote Transplantation
The Health Resources and Services Administration, part of the U.S.
Department of Health and Human Services, recently awarded funds totaling
almost $50 million to support a variety of activities meant to improve
and encourage organ, tissue, bone marrow, cord blood and circulating
blood stem cell donations.
“These awards will help sustain our recent achievements in raising
donation to new heights,” said HRSA Administrator Betty Duke. “The
number of monthly donors reached 733 this past May, surpassing 700 monthly
donors for the first time. This is an incredible gain from just a year
ago, when a new monthly record of 619 donors was set in June 2005.”
About $38 million of the $50 million total were awarded as contracts
under the C.W. Bill Young Cell Transplantation Program to the National
Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) in Minneapolis, Minn. The initial two-year
contracts will support the establishment and operation of the:
- Bone Marrow Coordinating Center, which received $34,910,015 to aid
unrelated-donor blood stem cell transplants that use cells from adult
volunteer donors and to recruit additional adults as volunteer potential
donors;
- National Cord Blood Coordinating Center, which received $1,850,985
to help unrelated-donor blood stem cell transplants that use cells
from umbilical cord blood; and the
- Office of Patient Advocacy/Single Point of Access, which received
$1,226,354 to provide patient advocacy and case management services
to patients in need of unrelated-donor blood stem cell transplants.
The office also will provide a single point of access through which
health care professionals and patients can search electronically for
the best available cells for transplant from adult marrow donors and
cord blood units.
HRSA also announced a contract worth $6,180,029 to the Center for International
Blood and Marrow Transplant Research (CIBMTR) at the Medical College
of Wisconsin in Milwaukee. Those funds will be used to collect and analyze
standardized data on the outcomes of blood stem cell transplants that
use cells from bone marrow or cord blood and related therapies.
Transplants of bone marrow, blood-forming cells collected from blood
(called Peripheral Blood Stem Cell or PBSC), and umbilical cord blood
can save the lives of many patients with leukemia, lymphoma and other
blood diseases. Transplants
(http://www.marrow.org/DONOR/ABCs/index.html) replace a patient's
unhealthy blood cells with healthy cells from a volunteer donor.
HRSA also announced 11 awards worth $5.2 million to encourage organ
and tissue donation through four separate grant programs.
- Three awards will help teams of organ procurement organizations
and hospitals from the same donation service area coordinate and implement
strategies to increase donation. The awards went to Hartford (Conn.)
Hospital, $54,281; St. Vincent Mercy Medical Center in Toledo, Ohio,
$63,382; and LifeNet of Virginia Beach, Va., $57,826.
- Six awards support social and behavioral interventions to enhance
understanding of ways to encourage members of the public to become
donors. The awards went to Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind.,
$319,021; Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore,
$298,093; New York Center for Liver Transplantation Inc. in East Greenbush,
$264,924; Lifeline of Ohio Organ Procurement in Columbus, $185,876;
South Dakota Lions Eye Bank in Sioux Falls, $179,302; and LifeNet
in Virginia Beach, $77,147.
- The Kentucky Cabinet for Health and Family Services received a grant
of $175,725 to help states without a donor registry develop and implement
an electronic system to obtain and store pledges of residents to become
donors. Learn more about state
donor registries (http://newsroom.hrsa.gov/newssummary/march2006.htm#OrganDonation).
- And the Regents of the University of Michigan received a $3.5 million
grant to reimburse travel and subsistence expenses incurred by individuals
making living donations.
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