McMaster University’s Alpha Epsilon Pi chapter’s philanthropic chair Dustin Shulman, left, helped register about 760 students for the OneMatch bone marrow and stem cell registry.

Managed by Canadian Blood Services, OneMatch has a database that contains the tissue types of the registrants. This database is used to find a match for patients awaiting a stem cell transplant.

The registry, which took place on Nov. 9, was organized by McMaster’s chapter of the international Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi.  

Dustin Shulman, philanthropic chair for the chapter and main organizer of the Got Swabbed event, said he was inspired to plan the event when he heard the story of Jonathan Grossman, a Thornhill, Ont., man who was searching for a bone marrow match last spring.

“I was astonished by the determination to find a match and the community’s positive response in finding one,” he said.  

Despite the transplant, Grossman died from chemotherapy complications on Aug. 30.

Shari Silverman, a Thornhill woman with leukemia, is currently seeking a match and has set up the Shari Mission, which aims to collect registrants as potential donors.  

Her family members volunteered in the McMaster drive through recruiting students.

The Shari Mission recently organized several drives in the Thornhill area.

The odds of finding a match are very low, said Shulman, explaining that there is less than a 30 per cent chance of a match within the patient’s family, and the chances decrease the further outside their family they go.

He said there is ultimately less than a one per cent chance of a registrant being paired with a patient through the database.

 “We have over 760 people who were swabbed on Monday,” he said. “That means, statistically, six or seven people will have their lives saved because of this event.”

John Bromley, the national communications manager for OneMatch, said the main message was to increase the number of Jews involved in the registry.

“Even though Jewish people come under the Caucasian group, they still have a better chance of finding a match through the Jewish community,” he said, adding that 82 per cent of the registry is Caucasian, so there is also a strong focus on promoting diversity in the registry in general.

The goal was to break the world record of new bone marrow registrants collected in a single day.  

Shulman said members of the fraternity stayed in the student centre overnight because the record requirement was a 24-hour drive.

Although they fell short of the record by about 200 people, Shulman said the turnout was fantastic, with the final number somewhere above 760 new registrants.

“The record isn’t the biggest deal,” he said.  “I think going for it and doing our best is what it was really about.”

Jackie Brown, first-year representative for the Jewish Students’ Association, said she signed up to volunteer to help swab for a couple of hours, but ended up staying for five or six hours.

“It was an amazing experience,” she said.  “A lot of the time, if there’s a table set up in the students’ centre, people just walk by them, but we actually had lines of people waiting to register.”

Bromley agreed the event was a huge success, and the fraternity sent a strong message that they want to make a difference.

“Nothing else has come close to this within universities and colleges in the country,” he said.  “McMaster University has set the bar very, very high for other groups.”