Determining recruiting strategies for an adult stem cell registry

Throughout the world, regional and national registries exist to find stem cell donors for patients in need. The OneMatch Stem Cell and Marrow Network, Canada's public stem cell registry, was initiated in 1989 and has recruited well over 400,000 registrants. Given recent trends in the selection of adult donors by transplant centres, the registry strives for a composition that is increasingly male, has broad ethnic diversity and is predominantly comprised of young donors. In this paper, we describe two linear programming models to identify an optimal recruiting strategy for the OneMatch adult registry. Results suggest that there are trade-offs between increasing the number of ideal registrants (males under 36) and increasing the ethnic diversity of the registry. Making the registry younger and more male can be accomplished very quickly by significantly increasing the proportion of young Caucasian males. In the longer term, the ethnic composition of the registry can be made more diverse, but to do so requires either targeted recruiting strategies or a natural increase in the overall ethnic diversity of the Canadian population. A recruiting effort in excess of 25,000 individuals per annum is necessary to achieve sufficient flexibility to accomplish meaningful change to the registry composition.