Seun Adebiyi

I am a graduate of the Yale Law School and a cancer survivor/advocate. I also organized the first donor drive in Nigeria, and launched the Bone Marrow Registry in Nigeria, eventually received a cord blood transplant and have been cancer free for a decade. In 2018, the Nigerian registry merged with The Sunflower Registry, a South African stem cell registry to form the first pan-African stem cell donor registry, in which I serve as the compliance officer. The Sunflower Registry has held donor drives in Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria and South Africa, and plans to expand to the rest of the sub-Saharan continent. Our goal is to recruit 100,000 stem cell donors of African descent in order to improve the chances of cancer patients of African ancestry who need a matching donor.

Fewer than 17% of cancer patients of African ancestry in the United States find an unrelated donor, compared to over 70% of Caucasian patients. I want to close this gap by recruiting more African donors.

Bone marrow registry