Myla Cunanan, 11, right, shows her iPhone
to mom Leyna while in her room at UCSF.
Myla, a Filipino-American, has myeloid
sarcoma and is in need of a bone marrow
donor. However, Myla’s ethnicity has made
it difficult to find a compatible donor.
Beneath several blankets and a stuffed giraffe in her UC San Francisco hospital bed, 11year-old Myla Cunanan is resting after a morning of dialysis to treat a kidney-related
complication from her bone marrow transplant last year.
Myla is sedated and tired, but not enough to silence her spritely personality. “Mom, you
put the cover on backwards!” she exclaimed, disassembling her iPhone from its case and
flipping it around as her mother, Leyna Cunanan, laughed and lovingly stroked the hand
of her youngest daughter.
“She makes us all brave around her,” Leyna said of her daughter. “She knows that there
is a purpose for her for being here.”
Tuesday marked one year to the day since Myla was diagnosed with a rare cancer in which
a solid collection of leukemic cells occur outside of the bone marrow. The last year also
thrust Myla into the spotlight as she and her family sought to find a bone marrow donor,
a mission that turned out to be impossible due to a severe lack of Asian donors worldwide.
Myla is Filipino-American, and when doctors told her after three rounds of chemotherapy
in spring 2014 that she urgently needed a bone marrow transplant, her family learned just
how difficult it is to find a match.
In fact, Asians comprise just 6 percent of donors with Be The Match Registry, the largest
and most diverse marrow registry in the world.
“The rarer your ethnic subtype is, at least in the U.S., the less likely we are to find you a
good donor,” said Dr. Christopher Dvorack, who has treated Myla since last year and is
an assistant professor of clinical pediatrics in the Division of Allergy, Immunology, and
Blood and Marrow Transplant at UC San Francisco.
Last summer, her family registered about 300 donors through drives at their church,
Myla’s school and local shopping centers, and shared Myla’s plight on social media with
a photo of Myla holding a sign that reads, “Will you marrow me?”
But a match was not found, and by August, doctors told Myla’s family they would need to
use a half-match donor, which was Myla’s father. There are two main ways to donate bone
marrow. The first is to have needles inserted into hip bones to extract a small amount of
bone marrow. The second requires four days of injections of medicine designed to
stimulate bone marrow and cause it to release stem cells from the bone marrow into the
blood.
The problem with half-match donors is the patient’s immune system can reject the
donated bone marrow, which is what happened to Myla, Dvorack explained. “She initially
did well, she then later developed a complication that has kept her in the hospital,” he
said.
The complication means Myla’s kidneys function less than 15 percent. She was
subsequently diagnosed as chronic kidney disease Stage 5, and has been receiving
hemodialysis several times a week. But her family remain advocates for the need for more
bone marrow donors, particularly among ethnic minorities.
“We didn’t find a match for Myla ... but we would like to continue to have hold drives for
other patients,” her mother said.
Ruby Law, a recruitment director for the Asian American Donor Program based in
Alameda, worked with Myla and her family last year to seek a donor and said their efforts
have extended beyond simply finding a match.
“Myla’s family is very passionate about raising awareness of marrow and blood stem cell
donation,” Law said.