Started in 1988 with its office in Leiden (the Netherlands), the BMDW Editorial Board consists of one representative of each stem cell donor registry or cord blood bank participating in BMDW, and meets twice a year to discuss achievements and necessary improvements.

BMDW is a service provided and managed by Europdonor Foundation.

BMDW is a voluntary collaborative effort of stem cell donor registries and cord blood banks whose goal is to provide centralised information on the HLA phenotypes and other relevant data of unrelated stem cell donors and cord blood units and to make this information easily accessible to the physicians of patients in need of a hematopoietic stem cell transplant.

The original goal to collect the HLA phenotypes of volunteer stem cell donors and cord blood units, and to co-ordinate their world-wide distribution remain our primary goals. But new initiatives have been added:

• To maximise the chance of finding a stem cell donor or cord blood unit by providing access to all stem cell donors and cord blood units available in the world.
• To minimise the effort required for stem cell donor or cord blood unit searches: only registries with potential stem cell donors or cord blood units need to be contacted.
• To provide an estimate of the chance of finding a stem cell donor or cord blood unit for a given patient.
• To provide advanced search programs to identify partially matched stem cell donors or cord blood units.
• To facilitate search advice requests via the Internet.
• To facilitate improvements in family search strategies.
• To provide relevant general information for the benefit of the patient.
• To provide statistics on the increase of different registries, the number of DNA typed donors, etc.

BMDW - Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide * Plesmanlaan 1b * 2333 BZ Leiden * The Netherlands