About us

Finding the best possible donor for patients – worldwide

Registries, search units and transplant centers can initiate a DKMS Registry search to identify a suitable DKMS donor whose relevant HLA characteristics match those of their patient as closely as possible.

Dedicated to DKMS’s mission to give as many patients as possible a second chance at life, the DKMS Registry was founded as a non-profit subsidiary of DKMS in 2020. However, DKMS had already been working as an official international registry since 2015, when the registry started to make DKMS BMST donors from India available to patients worldwide. Since then, we have expanded our international activities step by step and today also DKMS donors from Chile, the UK, Poland, Germany and South Africa are listed by the DKMS Registry for international requests. In the future, we are also planning to list cryopreserved products from the DKMS Stem Cell Bank. The result is an ethnically diverse donor pool with donors from six donor centers on four continents. With our donors’ listing, we are also creating a uniform, transparent and efficient process that enables international registries, search units and transplant centers to find and request 25% of the registered unrelated potential stem cell donors worldwide in one place, the DKMS Registry. Our goal is to keep pace with all needs in unrelated stem cell transplantation by introducing new features such as new markers, additional medical information and efficient donor request processes so that patients have an even better chance of finding the most suitable donor.

DKMS Registry - more than a donor registry

Providing access to our DKMS donors is only one of our tasks. Another responsibility we take on is to help patients and transplant centers in countries without a national bone marrow donor registry or with limited infrastructure. In these countries, transplant centers experience difficulties in getting access to unrelated donors – whether DKMS or non-DKMS.

We currently support transplant centers in India, Chile, South Africa and Colombia in their search for unrelated donors or cord blood units for their patients. To identify the best match, we search in both the DKMS and the worldwide donor pool of all international registries hosted by the World Marrow Donor Association. Our experienced search coordinators assist transplant centers with the worldwide donor search and donor selection process as well as with donor requests.

We collaborate internationally with registries and transplant centers to ensure access to donors across international borders, providing a consistent and quality-based service to all our partners at every step of the journey to transplantation.