All healthy people from age 18 through 55, who don't meet any of the exclusion criteria can register online.

Video instructions

With a donation of bone marrow and peripheral blood stem cells, certain suitability criteria must be met.  These serve to protect the patient as well as the donor. The most important exclusion criteria are:

• body weight under 50 Kilograms
• infectous hepatitis (hepatitis B, C)
• positive test for HIV (AIDS)
• positive test for Syphilis
• heart attack, angina pectoris 
• heart operation
• transplantation of foreign tissue
• certain blood clotting disorders
• intake of certain medications: e.g., heart medication (digitalis, nitroglycerine), cancer drugs (chemotherapeutic substances)
• blood transfusion since 1980
• cancer
  
• sexual contact for profit since 1977
• sexual contact between men since 1977

If you are not eligible to donate, or if you are not yet sure you'd like to donate, you can also help with a financial donation. If none of these exclusion criteria apply, click here for the online registration form.

There is a 20-30% chance that a matching donor can be found within a family, especially among siblings.  Others depend on finding an unrelated matching donor.

Since chances of this are quite small - there are billions of combinations with tissue markers -  it is important that as many potential blood stem cell donors as possible register.

Maybe you, with your specific tissue markers, are the right "type" and can give a new life to a seriously ill person!

Important aspects regarding registration and donation: 

• Voluntary decision with no outside pressure
  
• Without payment
  No entitlement to financial compensation
  

There is always, at any time, the option to withdraw a decision to donate blood stem cells.

In addition, there is anonymity between the donor and the patient.

Thank you for your registration.

A few days after you complete the online registration you will receive a set from us containing:

1. the printed questionnaire. Check your information again and confirm with your signature your intention to register. 
2. a cotton swab set that you can easily do yourself.  An instructional video will show you how. 

After returning the questionnaire and cotton swab set to us, you will receive your donor ID card.  In order to contact you in case of a donation request, it is important that you inform us of any change of address.

Tissue typing (HLA typing) is an complex laboratory test that is usually carried out on a blood sample or on a sample of saliva. It serves to determine various HLA markers. Some tissue types are fairly common whereas others are extremely rare.