BY Alison Bellamy
An Indian man has run the Virgin Money London Marathon this weekend (Sunday 24 April) to raise awareness of the need for more Asian donors to join the stem cell register.
Manivannan Ponnusamy, 33, from London wants to raise awareness of blood cancer as his wife, 32-year-old Rajee Nedunchezhian, has been living with chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) since she was 11 years old. Mani will be raising money for blood cancer charity Anthony Nolan, which runs the UK stem cell register.
‘My wife and I have been fighting CML for many years,’ said Mani, currently a software consultant working for Lansdowne Partners. ‘We want to draw attention to the need for donors from different countries and ethnicities.’
Mani is proud of his wife, a software engineer at JP Morgan, and says that when he met her he didn’t even know she was ill. ‘I met my wife at work in our first job out of university in Chennai. I didn’t know she had CML for three or four years. One of our friends told me she had cancer and I thought they were joking! She’s very ambitious and isn’t the type to tell people she’s ill as she doesn’t want it to define her.
I was shocked when I found out but it actually helped me to understand her better.’
For Mani’s family, it was more difficult to accept.
‘In India it’s usual to have an arranged marriage, which ours wasn’t – that was hard to tell our parents about for a start. In our case, to tell my parents Rajee had leukaemia was even harder and it took several months for them to accept it. Eventually they recognised that it was my decision and agreed to it, but it didn’t happen overnight,’ said Mani.
Mani has joined the Anthony Nolan donor register, which matches people who are willing to donate stem cells with people in need of lifesaving transplants. ‘We are trying to do what we can to help others,’ he said.
‘It’s going to be difficult to find Rajee a transplant unless we have a lot more Asians on the registry – that’s why we want to raise awareness.’
Someone in need of a transplant is most likely to find a match in a person from the same ethnic background. Currently, less than 4 per cent of the people on the UK register are Asian. Diversifying the register is vital in making sure that everyone, regardless of background, can receive a second chance at life.
Mani hopes to raise £10,000 for Anthony Nolan by running the marathon, which will pay for more potential donors to be added to the register. As it costs £60 to add each new person to the register that means 160 more people can be added to the register – for people with blood cancer, that’s 160 more chances of a cure.
‘My wife is scared about me running the marathon because I’ve not done anything like it before,’ Mani told us before the race on Sunday. ‘She made me promise that if I couldn’t get through 20 miles before the marathon then I wouldn’t run – but I’ve already done 20! She knows it’s important for me to do it and will be there on the day to cheer me on.’
Kirsty Low, head of events at Anthony Nolan, said: ‘Mani is doing something amazing by running the London Marathon for Anthony Nolan and raising awareness of the need for donors from ethnic minority backgrounds. Joining the register is incredibly simple but could make a huge difference to someone with blood cancer and their family.’
If you’re aged 16-30, in good health and weigh at least 50kg, visit www.anthonynolan.org to register for your free spit kit. For more information, visit www.anthonynolan.org
