Swab drive aims to find donor for student

Autumn Cole, sophomore nursing major, was diagnosed with leukemia in 2016. After spending some time in remission, Cole recently relapsed and is now searching for a match to undergo a bone marrow transplant that could potentially save her life.

DKMS (German Marrow Donor Program) works with patients who have blood cancers like leukemia, lymphoma and myeloma that need stem cell transplants or bone marrow transplants to live. When chemotherapy has failed for these patients, stem cell and bone marrow transplants are normally their last resort.

Adam Guthrie, DKMS student ambassador and sophomore nursing major, said because DKMS isn’t popular in West Virginia, he made it a personal goal of his to spread awareness, for instance, providing a swab drive Tuesday outside of the student center.

“Autumn got me involved in DKMS when she had leukemia the first time,” Guthrie said. “We’re here to find her a match and raise awareness to educate people, so that people know that they can get involved in a simple way.”

Guthrie said the test DKMS uses to identify matches requires a mouth swab that is then sent to laboratories to detect genetic matches.

“We swab people’s mouths, we get your saliva, and we extract your DNA from your saliva,” Guthrie said. “You go on a national registry, and then if you have a pretty close genetic match to a patient who has blood cancer, you can go donate your healthy stem cells to the patient and save their life.”

Since DKMS has been at Marshall, Guthrie said they have registered over 500 people to be potential blood marrow donors and that the outpour from students keeps on coming.

Emma Pertuset, a freshman at Marshall, said she never knew that you could just get your mouth swabbed to see if you can possibly help someone with blood cancer.

“All it takes is to get your mouth swabbed to see if you’re a match,” Pertuset said. “I figured ‘why not,’ it doesn’t take a lot of time.”

Pertuset said after seeing posts about the swab drive, she came for one main reason.

“I really enjoy helping others,” Pertuset said. “Even though there’s a low chance of matching, if I was to match, that would make me feel amazing. Knowing that I could potentially save someone’s life and getting to be the person that could help others would be awesome.”

Guthrie said being involved is a priority of Cole’s and that she is now pursuing her passion of nursing to help people in the future. Although Cole could not be at the drive, Guthrie said he knows this is something she would want to do to help someone else.

“She wants to give back, and she wants to help those patients that are going through what she’s going through right now too,” Guthrie said. “It’s nice to be here on her behalf. I would want someone to help me if I was in that situation, and I want to spread awareness to people here at Marshall that you never know when you could be in that situation.”

DKMS will be back on campus from 9:30 a.m.-3:00 p.m. on October 18.

Danite Belay can be contacted at [email protected].