Its 8th international donor registries conference and working group meetings held this year in Dublin, Ireland, was the best attended conference of its kind ever, with representatives from donor registries around the world. Dr. Isaac Yaniv, Medical Director, and Nira Shriki, Transplant Coordinator, represented Ezer Mizion's Bone Marrow Donor Registry at the event.

The conference featured a first-class scientific program, and set a new bar with its high quality sessions. The recurring praise, which echoed throughout the meeting, was the presentation of new topics of interest to guests and a broadening of the viewpoint of WMDA's work to new disciplines.

There were many discussions about scientific and logistic aspects of bone marrow transplants. Ideas were also shared on means of drafting new potential donors, as well as possibilities for international collaboration.

In the course of the conference, Ezer Mizion delegates presented the results of a scientific report summarizing the Registry's impressive accomplishments over the past decade. The report was well received by conference delegates, who were impressed by the dramatic growth of Ezer Mizion's registry, now ranked as the world's third largest donor registry. The remarkable statistics portraying the exceptionally high positive response off potential donors to go through with the transplant amazed the audience.

The World Marrow Donor Association (WMDA) was founded in 1994 as a non-profit international organization, with the objective of promoting international cooperation in the search for unrelated matching bone marrow donors for patients around the world. It serves as a voluntary international network of donor registries and cord blood banks to provide quality assurance standards and guidelines for donor recruitment, testing, collection, storage, matching and transport of haematopoietic stem cells. The organization addresses ethical issues and facilitates exchange of information related to the stem cell transplant process across the globe.