LAPD Harbor Division Officer In Need Of Bone Marrow Match

LOS ANGELES, CA — A Los Angeles police officer diagnosed a few months ago with a rare blood disease will probably die without a bone marrow transplant, but his ethnicity makes it harder to find a match, it was reported Thursday.

Matthew Medina, 40, has a less than 50 percent of finding a donor because he is not white, the Los Angeles Times reported. Most successful matches for bone marrow transplants involve a donor and patient of the same ethnicity. But the majority of the 25 million registered donors nationwide are white, and Medina is Filipino. So far, no match has been found.

"You're basically looking for a genetic twin," Athena Mari Asklipiadis, who runs Mixed Marrow, an L.A.-based organization trying to increase diversity in the bone marrow donor registry, told The Times.

A white American of European descent has a 75 percent chance of finding a perfect match in the national donor registry, compared with a 40 percent chance for Filipinos. Few Filipinos in the U.S. have signed up as potential donors, and there is no registry in the Philippines.

Researchers are experimenting with ways to perform bone marrow transplants on people who can't find matches. But while those treatments are being perfected, thousands of people are diagnosed every year with leukemia, lymphomas and other blood diseases whose only hope for a cure is a marrow transplant. And for them, it can come down to ethnicity.

Medina's wife, Angelee, has watched dozens of people at sign-up events across Southern California, particularly in the Filipino community, volunteer to donate bone marrow with the hope of curing her husband.

"We're very thankful for that," she said. "We're hoping something comes up."

For now, Medina is being kept alive with transfusions, according to The Times. He is quarantined at his home in Bellflower, where he lives with his wife and two young daughters. But he needs a transplant soon because his immune system is so weakened from his disease that exposure to a common virus could kill him.

"All you want is for that loved one to have a chance," said LAPD Officer Dante Pagulayan, Medina's partner at the LAPD Harbor Division and a childhood friend, The Times reported. "That's what we're praying for."

— City News Service, courtesy photo.