As Veronika Skvortsova, the head of the Federal Medical-Biological Agency (FMBA) said in 2023, the number of potential bone marrow donors in the Russian thematic database increased by 2.7 times, reaching a significant total of 334 thousand individuals . By the end of 2025, this figure should increase to 500 thousand names, which will cover about 90% of the need for unrelated transplants in Russia.
This means that the plans are to expand the register by 100 thousand donors per year. “At first we had 112 thousand bone marrow donors, which were combined from 11 separate registers, data were collected in them over 10 years. Over the past year, we increased the number of donors by 2.7 times. Today we have 334 thousand potential bone marrow donors in our database,” she said.
Skvortsova added that in 2023, the number of unrelated bone marrow transplants increased by more than 30%. Growth was achieved thanks to opening a high-tech lab at the Kirov Research Institute of Hematology and Blood Transfusion FMBA, which can perform 100k typings annually. For three out of four patients who require unrelated bone marrow transplantation, it is possible to find a suitable donor in Russia.
The Russian Federation adopted a law in 2022 to create a unified federal register of bone marrow donors. The state budget covered the costs of searching for potential donors, conducting examinations, collecting bone marrow, and covering the donor’s travel expenses.