Stanford Professor Nalini Ambady needs your help

New Delhi: Nalini Ambady, the first Indian American woman professor working in the psychology department at the prestigious Stanford University in California needs help to survive. Suffering from a rare kind of blood cancer, she is not looking for organs, but only a few cells of the right kind. She has only six weeks to find it.

Nalini Ambady, a mother of two girls is undergoing chemotherapy for now but doctors have advised her to get a bone marrow transplant done at the earliest.

It is easiest to find a matching donor amongst siblings, but Ms Ambady has not found a match with them. She now needs to find a donor from outside her family.

Though America has a large bone marrow bank, not many specimens are from South Asians.

Hearing of her condition, some of Ms Ambady's friends and social networking groups have started looking for a donor for her in India.  Since Ms Ambady hails from Kochi in Kerala, they are tapping various Malayalee associations. They have decided to insert advertisements and appeals in the Kerala media seeking donors to save her life.

There is a dedicated Facebook page to help find the donor and even special camps are being held in Kerala and Mumbai to get more people to register as donors.

While Ms Ambady has donated $25,000 for the effort, her family in India also donated around Rs.3.75 lakhs in the hope of finding a right donor match - considered a 1 in 20,000 possibility by her doctors.

Besides the cost of the test, the results take around 3 weeks to arrive before the follow-up procedures can be taken up.

Her friend Dilip D'souza  said that after a recent spell of hospitalization, she is presently at home and may be undergo another round of treatment in a hospital.

India has three bone marrow registries but only about 25,000 samples. Experts say India needs at least 500,000 donors considering the great genetic variation the country has.