Equality Down to the Marrow: A Glimpse Into What Is Possible In The Middle East
Last June, the popular Saudi Arabian daily Al-Watan had something positive to say about its regional neighbor.
Columnist Fawaz al-‘Ilmi told readers that “the only registry in the world for Arab bone marrow donors is located in the Hadassah Medical Center, associated with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.” Noting that “Arabs living in Israel constitute no more than 1.5 million of the world’s 400 million-plus ethnic Arabs,” he credited Amal Bishara, an Arab woman with a doctorate in life sciences and immunology, with building the groundbreaking registry.
“We were delighted with the mention,” says Bishara, a 35-year veteran of Hadassah’s tissue typing and immunogenetics department, of this rare praise for Israel in the Arab media. “It honors Hadassah and promotes the urgency for an Arab registry.”
This is the second time Hadassah has been first with a bone marrow bank. In 1987, it opened Israel’s first Bone Marrow Donor Registry, shortly after doctors learned how to transplant the spongy tissue inside the bones of healthy donors into sick patients.
“Setting up a registry of unrelated bone marrow donors in Israel was essential,” says Dr. Chaim Brautbar, the driving force behind the bank and former head of tissue typing and immunogenetics at Hadassah. Stem cells in donated bone marrow replace sick cells with healthy ones and are the only known cure for many inherited diseases and cancers, he explains. But donated bone marrow must be a close genetic match.
“Because every ethnic group has distinct inherited markers, Israelis [and Jews worldwide] have a greater chance of finding a matched donor in an Israeli bank than in a European or North American registry,” Dr. Brautbar says. “With every member of a devoted team putting a shoulder to the wheel, we created a registry in the 1980s that saved and continues to save lives.”
Hadassah’s registry today has some 100,000 potential donors as well as over 7,000 umbilical cord-blood units, their details among the 18 million entries in the global databank of the World Marrow Donor Association. From the outset, however, there were few Arabs among the entries. As recently as four years ago, only 200 Arab donors were listed in Hadassah’s registry.
Suspicion and lack of knowledge have stopped Arabs coming forward as donors,” says Shoshana Israel, who joined the tissue typing unit in 1993 and succeeded Dr. Brautbar as its head nine years later. “Several attempts were made over the years to set up an Arab bone marrow bank, but none succeeded. We needed funding for a targeted outreach and the right person to spearhead it.”