Steven González Jr. starts his sophomore year at the University of North Texas this week. The 20-year-old graphic design major, whose family lives in The Woodlands, has been a cancer survivor for more than seven years now. And he's "100 percent" sure he wouldn't be alive today if a mother hadn't donated the blood from her baby's umbilical cord. Steven doesn't know who or where she is, but that donation of cord blood, he believes, "definitely" saved his life.

Steven was 12 - "I had just started sixth grade" - when he was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. He needed intense chemotherapy to treat his cancer; he'd also need a bone marrow transplant.

"When we looked at the world registry, I didn't have a match," Steven recalled - not a single donor in the international registry had the same biological markers.

Why? For bone marrow to be a match, the donor and recipient generally must have the same racial or ethnic background, and Steven is of American Indian, Mexican and Puerto Rican ancestry.

"We had every family member tested, but nobody matched him close enough," said Rosie González, Steven's mom. Even his younger sister, Sabrina, wasn't an exact match.

More Information

Donating cord blood

Cord blood can be used to treat serious illnesses such as leukemia and lymphoma.

How it works: The umbilical cord is normally thrown away as medical waste after birth. When the mother volunteers to donate cord blood, the delivery team hands the cord off immediately after birth to a collector, who removes blood from the cord. The blood is then tested, frozen, stored in a public cord blood bank and added to the registry.

How to donate: Donating cord blood to a public bank is free and anonymous. To donate, talk to your doctor between the 28th and 34th week of pregnancy. When you deliver, you'll be asked to sign a consent form, and you - not the baby - will give a small blood sample that will be tested for infectious diseases.

Information: To find out more about donating bone marrow or cord blood, go to For a list of hospitals that collect cord blood, click on "Support the Cause."

The chances of finding a donor with Steven's exact makeup were rare, but the Gonzálezes scrambled to do what they could. Their extended family organized bone marrow donor drives in several states, which added more than 600 people to the registry. But Steven still didn't have the match he needed.

At the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, Steven's doctors told his parents he had a 2 percent chance of survival. Then the transplant team offered the family an option that they believed might be Steven's best shot at beating leukemia: a cord-blood transplant.

Cord blood, the blood left over in the umbilical cord after birth, has all the properties of regular blood, but it's also rich in stem cells used to cure illnesses such as leukemia, lymphoma and sickle cell anemia. A bone marrow transplant is usually the first choice to treat these diseases - but when a donor can't be found, the stem cells in cord blood can be a lifesaving solution.

While bone marrow must be a perfect match for transplant, cord blood allows a bit more leeway, said Tara Sadeghi, assistant director of regulatory and quality assurance at the M.D. Anderson Cord Blood Bank in Houston.

"Because the cells are more immature and primitive, it's easier to have a lesser match," she said. Those immature cells won't react as aggressively to being placed in a strange body and will generally adapt more readily to the unfamiliar environment - which means an inexact match can still save a life.

That has made cord blood an excellent resource for minority patients, who, like Steven, often struggle to find a bone marrow match.

"Basically, the needs of the minority are not being met by what we have in the registry," Sadeghi said. The quantity of bone marrow and cord blood for minorities is still lacking, she said. "We're trying to increase the inventory."

Since it started in 2005, the M.D. Anderson Cord Blood Bank has collected more than 58,000 umbilical cords from hospitals in Houston, Detroit and Palo Alto, Calif. Cords are collected from mothers who opt to donate to the public bank.

"When they come to the hospital for Lamaze classes or anything else, we talk about cord-blood banking," Sadeghi said. That discussion and education is key, she said: Donating to the public bank doesn't cost anything, and it's easy and anonymous, but it's simply not on the radar of most expectant parents. A recent Be the Match survey showed that only 27 percent of American adults were aware of the option to donate cord blood.

"A lot of people, they think maybe these cells are going to be used for cloning or something they don't want," Sadeghi said. That's why Be the Match and M.D. Anderson have put effort into educating people about how cord blood works and why it's useful.

And while embryonic stem cells are controversial, stem cells from cord blood are a different thing altogether. The umbilical cord is cast aside as medical waste if it's not donated.

"People always get confused when they hear 'stem cells' because they think (of) embryonic stem cells," Rosie González said.

After intense chemotherapy put his leukemia in remission, Steven had a double-cord transplant, which gave him the healthy cells he needed to recover. More than seven years later, he's a healthy college student who runs a nonprofit to help teen cancer patients.

"He was so fortunate that these cords were available and were matching," Sadeghi said. "He would not be here if he could not have that cord."