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The international association of stem cell donor registries and cord blood banks. When a patient needs a stem cell transplant and nobody in the family matches, transplant doctors search the donors of every member registry at once through WMDA's database.
WMDA describes its purpose as connecting patients who need stem cell transplants with volunteer donors worldwide. It was started informally in 1988 by three transplant pioneers, John Goldman (United Kingdom), E. Donnall Thomas (United States) and Jon J. van Rood (the Netherlands), to help donor registries work together and make cross-border transplants safer, faster and more reliable. Its office is in Leiden, the Netherlands. In the same year the Immunobiology Working Party of the European Society for Blood and Marrow Transplantation launched Bone Marrow Donors Worldwide (BMDW), a shared collection of volunteer donors' tissue types managed by the Europdonor Foundation, known today as the Matchis Foundation.
In 2017 WMDA, BMDW and the NetCord Foundation merged, WMDA began operating the Search & Match Service that brings donor and cord blood data together on one platform, and it became the coordinating body for the international cord blood community. WMDA states that the service is the world's largest haematopoietic cell donor database, listing 44 million stem cell donors and more than 750,000 cord blood units, and that its members are registries and cord blood banks from more than 57 countries. It writes shared ethical, medical, technical and financial standards, runs accreditation and certification of registries, and runs a service for reporting and managing serious adverse events and reactions. It is a nonprofit funded mainly by membership fees and by fees transplant centres pay to use the search service.
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