Stefan Morsch Foundation

Stefan Morsch Foundation
Purpose:	Register and refer bone marrow and stem cell donors
Chair:	Susanne Morsch
Consist:	since 1986
Founder:	Hiltrud and Emil Morsch
Seat:	Birch field
Website:	[2]

The Stefan Morsch Foundation , founded in 1986, is a foundation that runs the first German bone marrow and stem cell donor database . There are now around 490,000 potential stem cell donors in the file. The foundation's seat is in the Rhineland-Palatinate district town of Birkenfeld .

history

In 1984 Stefan Morsch from Hoppstädten-Weiersbach fell ill with leukemia . A bone marrow transplant was his only chance of survival. But none of his family had the appropriate tissue characteristics to be considered a donor. German doctors did not yet believe in the success of a bone marrow donation from an unrelated donor, so a transplant in the USA was the last hope. By chance, father Emil Morsch discovered a newspaper article about a bone marrow transplant of an eight-year-old. The report also mentioned a London organization that kept a list of bone marrow donors. Emil Morsch contacted them directly, but the family could not afford the costs of around DM 600,000. Calls from the media triggered a wave of willingness to help: the required sum was raised through various campaigns by artists and associations as well as private donations. A donor was quickly found - the 35-year-old Briton Terence Bayley. On July 31, 1984 in Seattle , USA , Stefan Morsch was the first European to have bone marrow from an unrelated donor. The transplant was successful, but the 17-year-old died on December 17, 1984 of complications from pneumonia .

Stefan's last wish was to set up a foundation to help other leukemia sufferers in their fight against leukemia. His parents, Hiltrud and Emil Morsch, founded the foundation on January 27, 1986, which they named after their son. Their goal was to set up a national bone marrow donor database in order to find suitable donors for patients as quickly as possible.

Areas of responsibility

The foundation operates the first bone marrow and stem cell donor database in Germany. Suitable donors are found every day from a pool of around 490,000 potential life savers. She is a member of the German Bone Marrow and Stem Cell Donation Foundation (SKD). In addition to running the donor database, the Stefan Morsch Foundation also tries to help patients directly when they ask for help. This can be done with the mediation of clinics and doctors, but also with financial support. Uncovered costs of the patient, which arose from the leukemia and which led to an economic emergency, are covered by the Stefan Morsch Foundation. In addition, for example, subsidies for flight costs for treatment abroad can be granted.

The foundation travels all over Germany all year round to educate people about bone marrow and stem cell donations. During typing campaigns , she specifically tries to find potential lifeguards for patients.

Departments and cooperation partners

In 1994 the clinic for bone marrow transplantation at the Idar-Oberstein Clinic was established by the foundation. All congenital and acquired blood diseases and immune deficiencies, thalassemia , all leukemias and most oncological diseases are treated in Idar-Oberstein .

In 1999, with the financial support of the foundation, a transplant unit was set up on the Benjamin Franklin campus of the Charité in Berlin. As a result of this initiative, around 100 blood-forming stem cells have been transferred annually to the “Stefan Morsch Station” since 2002 , around half of them from external donors.

The foundation's international donor search center has existed since January 1, 2003, searching worldwide for suitable donors for patients from the Russian transplant centers in St. Petersburg and Moscow and the Jordanian center in Amman . The in-house apheresis station was built in 2005 , so that stem cell collection can now be carried out at the headquarters in Birkenfeld, Rhineland-Palatinate. The care from the entry in the file to the donation is therefore in the hands of the employees of the Stefan Morsch Foundation, which means that they can guarantee all-round support.

In January 2012, thanks to the financial support from the foundation, the Stefan Morsch ward was opened at the St. Franziskus Hospital in Flensburg. Since then, stem cell transplants have been carried out in Germany's northernmost hospital under the direction of chief physician Nadezda Basara.

The foundation also has one of the most modern HLA laboratories in Europe. Here, the tissue characteristics of patients and donors can be analyzed in large numbers using a wide variety of methods (HLA typing). The HLA laboratory is accredited by the American society ASHI ( American Society for Histocompatibility and Immunogenetics ) and by the European society EFI ( European Federation for Immunogenetics ), recognition as a qualified laboratory according to international standards and thus a prerequisite for the examination of clinically relevant samples . The molecular biological DNA typing is done by hybridization with probes (SSO method), by using various PCR primers (SSP method) or by sequencing (SBT method).

Web links

Homepage

Individual evidence

^ The Stefan Morsch Foundation - About the Foundation . Website of the Stefan Morsch Foundation. Retrieved August 23, 2020.
^ The Stefan Morsch Foundation - Board of Directors . Website of the Stefan Morsch Foundation. Retrieved November 23, 2017.
^ [1] Report in the Saarbrücker Zeitung. Retrieved August 23, 2020.

[1] The Stefan Morsch Foundation - About the Foundation . Website of the Stefan Morsch Foundation. Retrieved August 23, 2020.

[2] The Stefan Morsch Foundation - Board of Directors . Website of the Stefan Morsch Foundation. Retrieved November 23, 2017.

[3] [1] Report in the Saarbrücker Zeitung. Retrieved August 23, 2020.