Last year Cambridge Marrow – the Cambridge University branch of a national student-run society that aims to help save the lives of people with bone cancer – had the most successful year in its history, signing up over a thousand students to the Anthony Nolan Trust’s bone marrow register. Now one of the University’s most successful charities, it felt apt to sit down with Harriet Gooch, this year’s president, and find out how they managed it.

Gooch attributes this success largely to the ‘#MatchForLara’ campaign, an attempt to which to find a stem cell donor for 24-year-old Lara Casalotti which reached viral status early last year. As a result of the prominence of the campaign, started by Lara’s family, turnout at Cambridge Marrow’s sign-ups soon rocketed: “we got 658 people at one event. We broke the record for sign-ups, though it was then immediately broken by Bristol the next week… not that we’re complaining! A thousand people registered that year and we were nominated for an Anthony Nolan Award! It’s all been very successful.

“After that, though, things settled down a bit and we got about 70 to 80 people.” Seeking to continue the success of the ‘#MatchForLara’ model, Gooch tells me about “an adorable kid called Ally, who is Korean. If you are BME it’s much harder to find a donor and he has Chronic Granulomatous Disease – his immune system doesn’t work – so he needs a match. We are going to be pushing this in a similar way to Lara’s”.

“So many people are still in desperate need of Stem Cell Transplants that may well save their lives”

Harriet Gooch

Talking about Ally, who is one of many persons in need of a match, leads Gooch to speak more broadly about Cambridge Marrow’s objectives for the coming year. Indeed, the main aim of Cambridge Marrow’s work, Gooch explains, remains getting Cambridge students to sign up to the Anthony Nolan Trust’s register of donors. To that end, her team will be running a series of events throughout the year that encourage students to “come and spit in cups”. Their saliva sample is then sent off to the Charity’s laboratory, where it is logged and, if the DNA sample is a match for a cancer patient, then they will be invited to donate their stem cells.

“About one in 100 of those on the register go on to donate, largely due to the low chances of being matched”, she says. Nevertheless, having as many people as possible on the register is crucial for those in need of a match and, for this reason, Cambridge Marrow is eager to boost signups. “We usually go to colleges for our events so people don’t even have to leave. We know Cambridge students are very busy and so we try to make it as easy as possible for them”, Gooch tells me. “Signing up to the Anthony Nolan Trust’s register is very easy to do and you could save a life.”

A particular challenge, though, is that presented by a lack of diversity. As the ‘#MatchForLara’ campaign demonstrated, the Anthony Nolan Trust’s register of donors is overwhelmingly white, with troubling consequences for BME persons. As Gooch observes, “the big focus of events that we are running at the moment is diversity. There are a lot of white people on the register and not enough BME people. You only have a 20 per cent chance of finding a donor if you are a BME person, whereas, if you are white, the chances are much higher”. Her team are therefore particularly eager to encourage involvement from this section of the Cambridge student body, knowing that they are most likely to be able to make a difference.

#MatchForLara campaign hits Cambridge

It is while discussing the difficulties of BME cancer patients that Gooch becomes particularly serious. She and her team are keen to combat a particularly damaging misconception that many people have about the charity and the process: that donating stem cells is an unpleasant process. “An important thing in our work is myth-busting. A lot of people think that giving stem cells is very painful but it isn’t. You have to have injections for a few days beforehand to create more stem cells and then you sit for four hours and a dialysis machine takes out your blood. It’s really very painless.” Cambridge Marrow is consequently seeking to inform Cambridge students of the process of donating stem cells, in order to reassure those who tend to be put off by words such as ‘operation’ and ‘dialysis machine’.

Though Cambridge Marrow’s success is fairly recent, Gooch is confident about its future. “We don’t think we can top ‘#MatchForLara’”, she says, ‘but we are trying to keep up the momentum this term. Just over a year ago we joined the worldwide campaign and helped find a ‘#MatchForLara’. But the work does not stop there: so many people are still in desperate need of Stem Cell Transplants that may well save their lives.”

Cambridge Marrow is running another spit drive between 10 am and 6 pm on the Tuesday 24th January in the TV Room in Christ’s College. More information is available on their Facebook page