Jay Feinberg Lh.D, hc | |
|---|---|
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| Born | |
| Alma mater | Dickinson College |
| Occupation(s) | Bone Marrow Registry Founder and CEO |
| Board member of | Gift of Life Marrow Registry |
Jay Feinberg (born August 1968 in New York City) is a long-term leukemia survivor, community organizer and founder and current CEO of the Gift of Life Marrow Registry.
Feinberg was a 22-year-old foreign-exchange analyst for the Federal Reserve in New York in 1991, just starting law school when he was diagnosed with leukemia and told that a bone marrow transplant was his only hope. [1] A matching donor was not found in Feinberg's immediate family. Knowing that tissue type is influenced by one's ethnic background - inherited like eye color, his friends and relatives widened their search to the unrelated population, focusing on increasing the representation of Ashkenazi Jews. [2]
Feinberg's plight, along with that of Mario Cooper, a graphic design artist, and Erskine Henderson, an attorney at Skadden Arps, was featured in a 1991 New York Times article. [3] Massive screenings were organized in Jewish communities throughout North America and Israel. In addition, screenings were held in Belarus (by Arnie Draiman and Bill Begal), Australia and South Africa. [4]
By 1995, more than 55,000 people had been tested. [5] Feinberg's condition was rapidly deteriorating and only a partial match had been found. A friend in Milwaukee organized one last drive and teenager Becky Faibisoff, a 16-year-old girl from Illinois, [1] was found to be a match. Feinberg received his successful transplant at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA. [6]
Feinberg's experience led him to devote his life to building a movement to educate and encourage people to add themselves to bone marrow registries around the world and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of donor Registry operations and strategy. The Gift of Life Marrow Registry, the Florida-based organization of which he is founder and CEO, [1] seeks to increase ethnic diversity in the global donor pool. This is because tissue type is inherited, like eye or hair color, so a patient's best chance of finding a genetic match lies with those of similar background. The recruitment model Feinberg created for increasing the representation of Jewish donors in the registry during his own donor search, has since been replicated to help increase representation of donors of African America, Hispanic, Asian and Native American backgrounds. [7]
Feinberg helped the organization to become a world leader in its field. [8]
In 2019, Feinberg led the establishment of the world's first registry-integrated stem cell collection center, based at Gift of Life's headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida. There were two reasons for this new facility. First, Feinberg wanted to re-engineer the donor experience, providing apheresis services in a non-hospital setting that provided donors with all the amenities of a spa-like experience. Second, to expedite the time to transplant for patients, by limiting the collection center solely to peripheral blood stem cell collections for the registry.
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Hematopoietic stem-cell transplantation (HSCT) is the transplantation of multipotent hematopoietic stem cells, usually derived from bone marrow, peripheral blood, or umbilical cord blood in order to replicate inside of a patient and to produce additional normal blood cells. It may be autologous, allogeneic or syngeneic.
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The National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP) is a nonprofit organization founded in 1986 and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, that operates the Be The Match Registry of volunteer hematopoietic cell donors and umbilical cord blood units in the United States.
World Marrow Donor Association (WMDA) is an organization based in Leiden, Netherlands, that coordinates the collection of the HLA phenotypes and other relevant data of volunteer hematopoietic cell donors and cord blood units across the globe.
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Georges Mathé was a French oncologist and immunologist. In November 1958, he performed the first successful allogeneic bone marrow transplant ever performed on unrelated human beings.
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Janet Liang was a prominent health advocate and activist who advocated for ethnic minorities in the United States to join the national marrow registry, the National Marrow Donor Program. In 2011, she was selected as one of Asian Pacific Americans for Progress's Unsung Heroes. In 2012, Liang won the City of Pleasanton's 2012 Juanita Haugen Community of Character Awards.
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