Shanghai Driver Donates Stem Cells to 7-year-old British Cancer Patient

He is just a driver in Shanghai, but he registered for a stem cell drive through his workplace, not imagining that it would serve too much purpose. But soon, he got the news that his stem cells had found a match to a boy in England, who was just seven years old.

Jiang Yongfeng, immediately agreed to the donation, according to bbc.com.

"I was very surprised. I was so excited to get a match so soon. Fate was knocking on my door," he says. "When I learned the boy was only born in 2007, I was even more confident I made the right decision."

Jiang Yongfeng, 35, is the 11th donor of stem cells from Shanghai to for a foreign patient, and the first for a British citizen. The collection procedure will be next Tuesday or Wednesday, according to en.jsq.sh.

Patients of cancer or other immune diseases require stem cell transplants and need to quickly identify a donor with "near-identical genes". Hence, the matched pair needs to have the ethnic background so the immune cells of the donor and recipient work together.

Hence, even if it is a tiny percentage, the "long-distance match" between the old and the young boy can work like a medical magic.

The boy who will get the donation is from a Chinese family. Luckily, Mr Jiang gave a saliva sample so that he could sign up for the stem cell registry. Very few Chinese are in the list of donors. Even though the Chinese constitute 20% of the world's population, just 4% on the global stem cell registry are of that origin, explains the OtherHalf Chinese Stem Cell Initiative.

Jiang underwent a surgery that removed the stem cells in a painless surgery.

The match was rare, explains Dr Zhang Yi from the Shanghai division of the Chinese Red Cross, the organisation that supervised the donation.

"There are fewer people of Chinese origin in European and American countries, so most matches are within China," says Dr Zhang. "We have found only 320 matches using the Shanghai database, out of 13,700 potential donors."

Instead of the bone marrow extraction, Jiang used the lengthy blood transfusion method. He was there just a few days before the surgery to take on injections into his blood and "activate" the stem cells.

Next, he was attached to a transfusion machine for three hours, even as the healthy stem cells were taken out from his blood system. Mr Jiang will not undergo any negative health effects, it is felt.

The donors and recipients are kept apart, according to the Red Cross as the patient suffers from repetitive illnesses. Earlier, some recipients would meet donors directly, but at times put pressure on them to donate stem cells repeatedly if their illness resurfaced.

Jiang Yongfeng was asked whether he wanted to know the little boy's name, but he refused.

"I just want the procedure to be done as soon as possible so they can send my cells back to the UK and help the little kid recover as soon as possible," said Jiang. "I hope he can be brave and strong and he can live a good life."