Rapid growth
This initiative resulted in the non-profit organization of the DKMS on May 28, 1991. Claudia Rutt was appointed as the Chief Executive Office and under her management, more than 68,000 potential donors already registered during the year of the company’s foundation alone. In 1992, seven stem cell donations were also enabled by DKMS donors.

In the meantime, DKMS is the largest stem cell donor center in the world that has been able to give more than 36.206 patients hope over the past twenty years. Today, on average fourteen DKMS donors give patients both domestically and abroad a chance for life every day. We work with Cellex Medical Services (CMS). Cellex is the largest collection center at DKMS. As a medical center, Cellex / CMS looks after the medical evaluation and care of donors before, during and after the donation.

The former citizens’ movement is now a professionally functioning organization with 371 women and men employed full- or part-time, assigned to the locations in Tübingen, Cologne, Berlin and Hövelhof, Westfalia, that conduct more than 700 donor drives every year during which over 250,000 new potential stem cell donors are registered with the support of countless volunteers, private initiatives and companies.

Initially sponsored, now in demand
During its first few years of existence, DKMS was sponsored by the Deutsche Krebshilfe (German Cancer Society), the Federal Ministry for Health (BMG) as well as numerous company and private donations. Since 1994, public funds have no longer been available for the expansion of the donor center. That’s why the DKMS is dependent on donations for the continued quantitative expansion of its donor center. Quite often, the donor bears the costs for tissue typing him- or herself – and we would like to take this opportunity to extend our most cordial thanks for that!

The DKMS has always succeeded in ensuring the analysis of tissue characteristics (tissue typing) at a low cost and with high quality. For this purpose, it works together with leading national and international laboratories. In this way, costs for a tissue typing that had originally amounted to DM 600 in the initial years have now been reduced to EUR 50 today. In the process, all tissue characteristics which are relevant for a transplantation have already been tissue typed during the registration in a high resolution manner since 2010.