Dozens showed up at Brother Bill’s Helping Hand in Dallas on Sunday at a blood stem cell registration drive to support a 4-year-old boy battling an aggressive form of leukemia.
Dak Lopez, named after Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott, was diagnosed with cancer in April and has already gone through one round of chemotherapy.
“He’s in remission right now. But doctors say [that] since he has an aggressive form of leukemia, they expect that he’ll relapse,” said Lopez’s dad, Adam.
According to Medical News Today, “Stem cell transplants help with leukemia by enabling the body to replace damaged blood cells with healthy ones.”
This allows doctors to use higher doses of chemo to kill acute myeloid leukemia cells, reports Cancer.org.
At the Brother Bill’s Helping Hand event on Sunday, several people had their cheeks swabbed and registered with DKMS as potentially life-saving blood stem donors.
DKMS is an international nonprofit organization dedicated to the fight against blood cancer and blood disorders. The event helped to raise awareness about the critical donor shortage.
“We’re hoping we can find more matches through this today. And I’m hoping, knowing Dak, knowing the kid he is, that would put a big smile on his face,” Lopez told NBC DFW.
One thing that indeed put a smile on Dak’s face was the special video message sent to him from his namesake, Dak Prescott, who shared words of encouragement.
Finding a perfect blood stem cell match is difficult due to the lack of donors. According to DKMS, the suitability of a match is based on the patient and donor’s human leukocyte antigen (HLA) combination (tissue type) rather than blood type.
“There are tens of thousands of HLA characteristics that exist (and more keep being discovered!), which exist in millions of combinations. This makes finding matches really difficult. That’s why it’s so important to have more people on the stem cell registry. The more donors, the higher chances for matches. And the more hope,” explains the DKMS website.
The 4-year-old will start his second round of chemotherapy this week.
Anyone in good health between the ages of 18-55, especially members of the Hispanic community, could qualify as a potential donor for Dak. Contact DKMS.org to register as a potential donor.
