OMAHA, Neb. (KMTV) — Looking at her now, you can't tell what Melissa Pierpoint has been through.
But in October 2021, she started to get sick. Her skin peeled. A mass formed on her right eye. She had fevers up to 105 degrees. Her resting heart rate was 150 beats per minute. She miscarried a pregnancy.
The 28-year-old wife and mother of three was eventually diagnosed with anaplastic large 'T' cell lymphoma. It's a rare blood cancer affecting her immune system.
"I feel good," she said. "Unless I'm going through chemo; that makes me feel pretty icky."
But there's a big step to go. She needs a successful stem cell transplant. The fight brought her to Nebraska Medicine, where 3 News Now met her at the Buffett Cancer Center.
The cure needs some luck, starting with a matching donor. Her full sister seemed like a promising place to start, but it turned out she wasn't a suitable match.
So the search turned elsewhere: her parents, her half-sister, and millions more in bone marrow registries.
Her parents were half matches. The registry search found a few potential matches, but further testing showed they weren't suitable.
A lack of diversity of potential donors
The chances Pierpoint would find a match in the registry was lower than it is for white people in the same situation.
Pierpoint, who is originally from Honduras, is Latina.
Hispanic and Latino patients have a 48% chance of finding a match in the registry. For white patients, it's 79%, according to to Be The Match. Native Americans are next with a 60% chance.
There are about 40-50 million people in the registries, said Sachit Patel, who works with pediatric patients needing blood and marrow transplants at Nebraska Medicine.
He said, "It totally depends on who makes up that 40 to 50 million people."
"The biggest hurdle that we're facing as transplanters is that there's not enough ethnic diversity in the donor pool," Patel said. "Fortunately, there is a lot of people of northern European descent that is in the registry. But ... all of the other non-northern European ethnicity are not that well represented."
Joining the registry
Patel and Pierpoint both encourage everyone to add their name to the list of potential donors. They say you can start at BeTheMatch.org. DNA samples are collected with a simple cheek swab and sent back in the mail for free.
"To have more chances at that best option is the best thing the community can do," Patel said.
Pierpoint said spreading the word is a big reason why she agreed to an interview with 3 News Now.
"What better way (to be an advocate) than this?" she said.
Improving odds for transplants from partial matches
While a full match is ideal, Patel says the science behind making transplants from partial matches successful is improving. It can at times be just as likely to work as a full match, he said.
That's what Pierpoint is doing. Her half-sister turned out to be a 60% match. She'll be admitted for the procedure in late December.
The risk is that Pierpoint's body won't accept the new cells. That causes graft versus host disease, which can be deadly. Her doctors give it a 70% chance of success.
"It's gone a long way," she said. "So I'm hopeful."
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