Welcome

My name is Katharina Harf, Executive Vice President of DKMS Americas. Welcome to our site.

DKMS is the world's largest marrow donor center with more than 1.7 million registered marrow donors. Yet many in North America are just getting to know us. We're out to change that, and would like to introduce ourselves to you.

Like many of you reading this, my life has been personally touched by leukemia.
I lost my mother, Mechtild, to leukemia at the age of fourteen. She was in need of a marrow transplant and the search for a life-saving donor seemed hopeless because, at the time, there were only 3,000 unrelated donors available in Germany.

In 1991, my father, Peter Harf, established DKMS in Germany, to find a matching donor for my mother. He inspired family and friends to change the hopeless situation in Germany by recruiting donors. Together, with family and friends, we worked tirelessly organizing donor drives, and in less than one year, successfully recruited over 65,000 donors.

We fought to save her life, but sadly, she lost her battle. After her death, we continued fighting in her honor, so that one day all patients in need of a marrow transplant would have a fair chance of finding their life-saver.

In just five years, DKMS became the world’s largest marrow donor center, and today still holds this distinction with a growing database of over 1.7 million registered donors. Since its inception, DKMS has facilitated more than 15,000 donors with patients.

In 2004, we expanded the DKMS mission to the United States, to diversify the donor pool and since then, we have registered more than 45,000 donors, and facilitated more than 60 transplants. But there is still much work to do. More than 820,000 Americans live with leukemia, lymphoma and other blood cancers. Only 3 out of 10 people will find a donor match. Together we can change these statistics and help make a difference.

We welcome you to join the DKMS family by becoming a donor. Together we can provide hope. Together we can provide a cure. Together we can make a difference.

DKMS Americas looks to the future with unwavering determination to continue our mission of saving one life after another.

It is the moment of the match that turns heartache into hope, and pain into healing.

Katharina Harf
Executive Vice President, DKMS Americas