Apratim Dutta checks a prospective bone marrow donor

Salt Lake’s Sector V will host a unique enlistment drive in January-end, one that will see executives from the tech hub queuing up to save lives.

New Jersey-based former executive Apratim Dutta will provide them with the opportunity. As India sleeps over plans to save blood cancer patients needing bone marrow transplant, Dutta is travelling across the country trying to find donors.

The Calcutta-born man, in his 30s, known as Tim to his friends, is behind the largest bone-marrow donor enlistment drive in India. The endeavour has taken him to Chennai, Bangalore, Hyderabad and Pune, where 2,800 donors have been enlisted in less than three weeks. Delhi and Calcutta are next on the itinerary.

“We are enlisting donors from companies that have agreed to assist us,” says Dutta, who was a mergers-and-acquisitions consultant till a couple of years back.

His life changed after wife Pia had a recurrence of the blood cancer she was diagnosed with in 2002. Chemotherapy, which had saved Pia, failed the second time, triggering a frantic search for a bone-marrow donor.

Pia is now recovering after a stem cell transplant. But Dutta refuses to slow down. His organisation, matchpia, has recruited 33,000 donors of south Asian origin in the US, including Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis and Sri Lankans.

Fifteen NRI blood cancer patients, apart from Pia, have received transplants from matchpia’s donors.

In contrast, India has less than 5,000 registered bone marrow donors, and the country has not seen a single transplant between unrelated people.

Narender Mehra, head of the department of transplant immunology and immunogenetics at AIIMS, was the first person Pia and Tim had approached after the cancer recurrence was diagnosed. The hospital, India’s nodal centre for bone marrow transplants, with a registry of less than 3,000 donors collected over six years, couldn’t find a match.

Mehra, also the coordinator of India’s efforts to put together a registry of donors, admitted that the government effort was “lagging well behind” that in other countries.

“The government has agreed in principle to launch a campaign to increase India’s donor registry to at least 100,000 in five years. The proposal, however, is still waiting to be cleared. The funding is yet to come,” he says.

Medals and certificates surround Mehra in his AIIMS office, but India’s inability to carry out a single bone marrow transplant between unrelated persons clearly rankles. “I don’t want to die before the first unrelated donor transplant in India,” adds the doctor.

The genetic match needed for bone marrow transplant, he explains, requires a much larger registry than the one currently available at AIIMS.

After a three-day donor drive in Delhi, Dutta will head for Calcutta. “Genpack has agreed to contribute donors. We are still finalising with other corporates,” he says.

Dutta’s list of admirers includes cardiac surgeon Naresh Trehan. “There’s a lot to be learnt from his work. What Dutta is doing is incredible,” observes the doctor.