Amy Katz, an eleven-year-old Pittsburgher and a sixth grader at Pittsburgh's Jefferson Middle School, recently started to play on her travel soccer team for the first time in months. Less than a year ago, Amy was diagnosed with Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML), a form of leukemia rarely found in children. She had struggled with her fight against cancer for almost eight months until she volunteered to be part of a worldwide study of a new cancer-fighting drug.

Although the drug is still in its experimental stages, Amy was willing to try it because “it would help other kids.” The drug has shown great promise: it is so specific in destroying infected cancer cells that it doesn’t target other fast-growing cells in Amy’s body, such as her hair, that would have been misclassified as cancer cells by traditional cancer-fighting drugs. In less than six months of treatment, Amy seems to be in remission from her disease, and now has the energy to start living a relatively normal life once again.

Amy had a sudden, miraculous recovery, but the drug was approved by the Food and Drug Administration for children less than a year ago and for adults only two and a half years ago; it is unclear whether or not it will remain effective for an extended period of time. Amy’s best chance for a permanent recovery from her disease is a bone marrow transplant, but no one in her family — nor in the 9 million registered bone marrow donors in the Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide (BMDW) database — are a match.

Thus, Amy’s Army was born.

Since November, dedicated volunteers have organized, manned, and helped find funding for bone marrow screening drives across Pittsburgh, hoping to find a match. This Friday, April 23, the blood drive workers on Carnegie Mellon’s campus will also be taking a small vial of blood in addition to the standard one pint donation. They will send the extra vial to the National Marrow Donors Program (NMDP). Once registered in the NMDP, donors will be part of a searchable database until they turn 62. Almost any person between the ages of 18 and 60 is eligible to donate.  

“You’re giving them a second chance at life,” said Amy’s mother, Lisa Katz, in a recent discussion with volunteers and students at the Hillel-JUC.

Although Amy is no longer in critical condition, Amy’s Army seeks to raise awareness about and membership in bone marrow registries. Even though the group hasn’t found a match so far, they are making a marked contribution for the 70 percent of other patients with life-threatening blood diseases who also cannot find a match within their own families.

The process is relatively simple: after a sample vial of blood is obtained from a person, it is sent to the NMDP, where the person's blood type is determined and subsequently entered into the database in approximately twelve weeks. If a person searching for a match finds a potential donor, the donor is called and asked to confirm his or her health status and to participate in additional blood tests. Once the match is confirmed, the donor is given the choice of whether to continue with the transplant.

Despite typical initial impressions, both methods of bone marrow extraction have relatively few side effects on the donor, and they are all short-lived. In one method, the donor goes under general anesthesia and the bone marrow is taken from the back side of their hip using a hypodermic needle. The side effects that are possible are nausea due to the anesthesia and an achy feeling in the lower back, which lasts in most cases for less than a week. In another method, called apheresis, the donor is hooked up to a machine that “sorts” their blood, allowing bone marrow stem cells to be extracted and the rest of the blood to be safely returned to the body. The main side effect is flu-like symptoms the four days before the apheresis when doctors administer a hormone that increases the release of stem cells from bones into the blood stream. Neither procedure typically requires a recovery period, allowing donors to go back into their daily lives the day after the procedure. The donor’s bone marrow is replenished naturally within two months, and in the meantime, their immune system performance is not affected.

Although there is only a 60 percent survival rate for transplant patients, without the transplants, the majority of leukemia patients would have no chance of survival at all.

Due to the loss of life during the Holocaust, Jews of Eastern-European descent are highly underrepresented in the BMDW database. Gift of Life, founded in the early nineties, was established to seek out and ask peoples of Jewish descent to register in the BMDW. Amy will be celebrating her Bat Mitzvah in the fall of 2005. Matches are more likely to be found within ethnic groups, and all minority students and staff members at Carnegie Mellon are especially encouraged to come out to donate on Friday.

The Amy’s Army blood and marrow drive will take place this Friday in Rangos 1 in the University Center from 8 am to 1:30 pm. Another drive specifically for bone marrow registration will take place on May 23 at the Community Day School in Squirrel Hill. Things that would ordinarily halt a normal blood donation — such as recent tattoos or piercings, low iron count, or having eaten at the Beaver County Chi-Chi’s Mexican restaurant — do not affect registration for bone marrow donation.

For more information, visit Amy’s Army’s webpage at http://www.amysarmy.org or the NMDP webpage at http://www.marrow.org/.