The Anthony Nolan / DATRI collaboration
Our three-year-long collaboration with India’s largest stem cell register DATRI has now come to an end, with promising results that could encourage similar collaborations in future.
Funded by NIHR, and led by Anthony Nolan’s Bioinformatics team, the project detailed the amazing diversity of tissue types across India, and identified regions that overlapped most with patients of South Asian heritage in the UK.
Through the project, 10,000 additional donors were recruited from those regions predicted to be most similar to South Asian patients in the UK. Donors recruited in this way were around six times more likely to be a match for UK patients who searched the DATRI register, compared to all other donors on the DATRI register.
The project has shown the benefit of this kind of strategy – not only for UK patients with South Asian heritage, but also for South Asian patients in India and around the world.
Where we are starting from
UK patients from minority ethnic backgrounds are more likely to have a unique tissue type and less likely to find a donor on UK registers compared to those from White, northern European backgrounds.
Asian patients are the largest demographic of patients from a minority ethnic background in the UK. Research from Anthony Nolan has shown that Asian patients in the UK were 1.5 times more likely to die from complications within five years of a donor transplant compared to White patients.
Just 7% of potential donors across the aligned UK registry are from an Asian background.
Anthony Nolan is addressing these inequities through several research projects, aiming to more clearly identify inequities and develop specific strategies to make stem cell transplantation fairer for every patient.
Our pilot project in collaboration with DATRI is an important step in our aims to improve donor availability for UK patients with South Asian heritage.
How the collaboration works
With funding from NIHR (National Institute for Health and Care Research), Anthony Nolan partnered with DATRI to recruit an additional 10,000 Indian donors from specific regions of India.
Anthony Nolan’s Bioinformatics team analysed tissue type data from the DATRI register to predict which regions of India would be more likely to contain donors whose tissue types most closely overlapped with South Asian patients in the UK.
Northwestern regions of India, including Rajasthan and Gujarat, were found to have the highest concentration of potential donors with tissue types similar to those most needed by UK patients. Previous recruitment by DATRI had concentrated in southern regions.
Once these regions of interest had been highlighted, DATRI’s recruitment efforts could be focused in the northwest, and the Bioinformatics team could review the success of the approach.
What we discovered
The major finding was that donors recruited through this project were around six times more likely to be a match for UK patients who needed to search the DATRI register for a donor, compared to the rest of the DATRI register as a whole.
In other words – donors recruited through this collaboration were indeed more likely to share a tissue type with South Asian patients in the UK.
It’s also important to highlight that this approach doesn’t just benefit South Asian patients in the UK – it has global impact. Diversifying the global stem cell register with tissue types that are currently less commonly represented can benefit people with South Asian heritage around the world.
Of the 10,000 donors recruited through this collaboration, as of late-2026, ten have gone on to donate to patients in India. We’re expecting to see more donations from this group of donors in future.
Overall this approach has shown that international collaborations like this can be an effective way to run data-driven recruitment strategies.
Our research shows that targeted, evidence-based recruitment and international collaboration can help diversify the global pool of stem cell donors and improve the chances of patients finding a matching donor.
The British Asian population is the largest minority ethnic group in the UK, making this collaboration with DATRI a natural first step to investigate the use of data-driven recruitment to reduce inequities. In future, this approach could be used to recruit more donors from India or other underrepresented regions, with the potential to save countless lives.
Dr James Robinson, Director of Bioinformatics Research at Anthony Nolan
What next?
Our Bioinformatics team will be releasing more findings from the project over the coming months, so make sure you’re following us for the latest.
We’ll also be seeking funding that will allow us to continue working on strategies like this that could address long-standing health inequities.
As well as working to increase the diversity of the global stem cell register, Anthony Nolan is also carrying out research to identify and address inequities in all areas of stem cell transplantation.