This contract was aimed at establishing a donor center for a National Marrow Donor Program to recruit and HLA type volunteer marrow donors. The Puget Sound Blood Center (PBSC) is working with the Coordinating Center in Minneapolis/St Paul, making the Seattle donors available to the National Program. This is the second most successful donor center, having entered more than 4,000 donors into the central file. They have devised a cost-effective, labor-efficient procedure for recruiting marrow donors from among whole blood donors and have been obtaining consent from 100-200 donors per month. Although many have been added to the National Register, blood samples from some of them are frozen awaiting resources to perform the HLA typing. The Demonstration and Education Project had succeeded to the point that the technology is now ready for transfer to other blood centers (marrow donor centers). Their HLA typing is excellent and they plan to complete the prospective HLA-DR typing of all their donors during this contract period.
