Organ and bone marrow transplants are often in the news, but great breakthroughs have been made in stem cell and cord blood research — procedures that are less invasive but still offer the gift of life.
Mariel Tadena is a University of Hawaiʻi student working toward a career in health care who signed up to be a donor. Stem cell transplant recipient Nicole Fabela lives in California, and her blood disorder interrupted her degree in nursing.
The Conversation spoke to them this week, along with Erika Sevilla, a spokesperson for the National Marrow Donor Program.
“The NMDP manages the National Registry of Blood Stem Cell Donors in the United States, and more than 9 million people have swabbed their cheek," Sevilla said. "They are typed and put on this national registry, and they wait for the call to potentially save a patient's life through blood stem cell transplant."
Tadena joined the registry at age 18, and a few months later, she received a call to be a donor for an anonymous patient. Tadena told HPR that after witnessing a donor-recipient meeting, she was inspired to become a donor herself.
“The recipient was a younger boy, and the donor was an adult female, and she had donated to him, and just hearing the story behind it, I remember just crying in my chair in the crowd,” Tadena told HPR.
The NMDP facilitates thousands of transplants every year. Various factors, such as ethnicity and genetic makeup, play a role in finding a match.
Sevilla said that both Fabela and Tadena are of Asian descent, and due to under-representation, Asian patients typically have less than a 60% chance of finding a fully matched donor.
Fabela received two other donations before Tadena’s in 2023: the first from her brother in 2021, which didn’t take, and the second from her sister in 2022, which lasted for about seven months.
“At the time, when I was still waiting for a match, my family and I were feeling pretty down as far as our morale, having gone through with two full match siblings, just for myself to relapse, and we were just really hoping that someone would open their heart to us and register and hopefully match for me," Fabela said.
"Science has come so far that Mariel and I were actually an 8-out-of-10 match. And with how much science has progressed, a lot of people are able to successfully go through a stem cell transplant, even with someone who is not a full match for them.”
Both Tadena and Fabela underscored the impact of becoming a donor to help change someone’s life.
"You're not just changing one life, but you're also having that opportunity, just giving their family, their loved ones, their friends, just more time with this person, not having to say goodbye too early," Tadena said.
To find out more about the NMDP, click here.
This story aired on The Conversation on Sept. 5, 2025. The Conversation airs weekdays at 11 a.m. Hannah Kaʻiulani Coburn adapted this story for the web.
