Sacramento State students came together once again in an attempt to save lives at the “Be the Match” bone marrow donation.

Started last year by the Sikh Student Association, the group hosts “Be the Match” registry booth at both Sac State and UC Davis. Together the schools got 300 students to join the registry.

“We’ve hosted this booth for two years to raise awareness for people who want to donate blood but can’t,” said Diljeet Birk, senior biomedical sciences major. “A lot of people get turned away or are afraid of needles. It’s less scary because they just do a cheek swab at first.”

More than 10,000 people look at the national registry every year to see if there is a potential genetic match to save their life. Ethnicity is still a major factor in marrow donations, but last year’s sponsored patient was matched with someone of a different nationality.

“Less than 2 percent of ethnic groups have signed up to be marrow donors,” Birk said. “We all live here to have the freedom to do this kind of thing, but we still lack people. Some people think it’s a racial thing, but cancer likes everything, anyone can get it. The more we have interracial couples, the less ethnicity matters with things like this.”

This year Student Association and Biocorps students are sponsoring an 8-year-old boy named Sameer, who was diagnosed with leukemia at age 2. Leukemia is the most common type of cancer treated by the marrow registry because it attacks both blood and bone marrow.

“Leukemia is a terrible disease and it’s really rare that someone’s stem cells match your own,” Jasmine Sekhon, a biomed major said. “With all these donors, there’s still only a chance that one person will match you.”

Donations can be done through bone marrow in the upper part of the hip bones. Seventy-five percent of people choose to go through peripheral blood stem cells. If done through blood stem cells, the donor has their blood drawn and separated from their stem cells.

“We want people to know that this isn’t all culturally based, you can help any culture,” said Lovereet Sekhon, biomedical sciences major.

Ivy McDonald can be reached at [email protected]