China to set up national bone marrow bank
( 2002-07-19 09:32 ) (8 )

A national bone marrow bank will be established in Shenzhen to aid China's four million or more leukemia patients, said an official from the China Red Cross Society (CRSC) in Shenzhen Thursday.

CRSC has begun to raise funds for the project. It has received a positive response from local residents as well as a number of enterprises.

The coastal city of Shenzhen already has such a bank on a citywide scale, which has helped a dozen leukemia sufferers. Medical experts attribute the diversified genes of migrant donors to the high compatibility.

However, they fear the collection of 2,600 samples is far from enough to help patients. Only when the bank has more than 100,000 samples of marrow can it satisfies the primary clinical demand, according to the experts.

A lack of funds is the major problem in establishing the gene bank, said the CRSC official.

It takes 500 yuan (60 US dollars) to test one donor and the expense amounts to 500 million (60 million dollars) for a bank of one million blood samples, said the official.