Come visit us at

Freedom + Fountain Sts.

at the Reston Town Center.  Thank you to all the volunteers!

We’re gearing up for the 10 AM start to Team Haupt’s inaugural Donor Drive Day! A crew of amazing volunteers is ready for action, and there’s a definite feeling in the air that the turn out today in Reston will be considerable. Stay tuned for more and check in with @Cure4Leukemia for live Twitter updates of the day’s events.

Team Haupt’s booth is at the corner of Freedom & Fountain Drives at Reston Town Center. Parking’s available in the garage directly across from our booth! For directions click here.

Check out Jonathan’s parents’ interview with ABC 7 DC’s Gail Pennbacker about this weekend’s drives in Reston:

 ”MD Man in Need of Bone Marrow Transplant”

And an exciting update: Team Haupt on Facebook is dangerously close to its 1000 member…

Go Team Haupt!

The past two days have been big ones for media coverage of Jonathan and Team Haupt’s DC and Baltimore bone marrow drives.

If you didn’t catch it during one of Channel 13’s broadcasts yesterday, you can still check out WJZ’s coverage of Jonathan: “MD man in need of bone marrow transplant.” Jonathan’s become an overnight celebrity on the 5th floor.  The fantastic Dr. Doug Smith even took the time to participate.

And a great Washington Post piece is running today from John Kelly, DC’s metro man-in-the-know: “Bone Marrow: Swab Your Cheek, Save a Life.”

Team Haupt is sending huge thanks to Sally Thorner at WJZ and John Kelly at the Washington Post for their support and coverage — invaluable in getting the word out to everyone about our Reston drives this weekend and the big Baltimore marrowfest on the 19th at Ryan’s Daughter!

I asked Jonathan to put on the new Team Haupt t-shirt for a pic, but he suggested (read: demanded ) I do it instead.  Jonathan is feeling great tonight. Cranking out jokes and getting ready to take some laps around the ward before Courtney gets here after a long day of work.

Everyone knows that more and more, patients and their families are turning to the internet for medical information. The Pew Internet and American Life Project recently reported that 61% of American adults look online for health information. Social networks are still only considered a small component of the larger online health information landscape.

Yet for patients like Jonathan, racing against time to find a bone marrow donor to save their life, social networking sites like Facebook have been become a vital resource.

Getting the word out is the key to any successful bone marrow drive, and Facebook has helped other leukemia patients in similar situations to Jonathan’s beat the odds to find the donor the experts said was next to impossible to do.

Twenty-eight-year old Nick Glasgow is one such inspiring story. Told by his doctors at Stanford that he had zero chance of finding a fully matched donor to cure his AML, his friends and family launched a passionate donor drive campaign online and off. Nick’s ethnicity is a quarter Japanese, and according to the Asian-American Donor Program only 7.2 percent are of Asian descent. Unbelievably, not one, but two perfect donors were found for Nick. His family credits Facebook and Twitter with driving the success of their efforts. Another inspiring story is of 27-year old AML patient Michelle, detailed at Project Michelle.

The issue is all in the numbers. A recent WSJ piece discussed how bone marrow registires are turning to Facebook and other social networks to help diversify the roster of potential donors, especially searching for donors of multiethnic backgrounds. Registries currently have limited representation of potential donors from multiethnic and minority backgrounds, including people with European Jewish heritage like Jonathan. Since a perfectly matched donor will most likely have the same or similar ethnicity as the patient, increasing the representation of potential donors from all backgrounds is vitally important.

So Team Haupt has turned to Facebook and Twitter to help get the word out about Jonathan’s urgent need. We are so thankful for the amazing support we’ve seen already. Plans for donor drives around the country in honor of Jonathan are in full swing, thanks to DKMS, and your help today in spreading the word through Facebook, word of mouth, and every other means in between will ensure that Jonathan’s donor story defies the odds just like Nick’s. Got Marrow? You bet.