Jay Feinberg (born August 1968 in New York City) is a long-term leukemia survivor, community organizer and founder and current CEO of the Gift of Life Marrow Registry.

Leukemia, and search for a donor

Raised in West Orange, New Jersey, Feinberg graduated in 1986 from Saddle River Day School. He was a 22-year-old foreign-exchange analyst for the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1991, just starting law school when he was diagnosed with leukemia and told that a bone marrow transplant was his only hope. A matching donor was not found in Feinberg's immediate family. Knowing that tissue type is influenced by one's ethnic background - inherited like eye color, his friends and relatives widened their search to the unrelated population, focusing on increasing the representation of Ashkenazi Jews. Feinberg's plight, along with that of Mario Cooper, a graphic design artist, and Erskine Henderson, an attorney at Skadden Arps, was featured in a 1991 article in The New York Times. Massive screenings were organized in Jewish communities throughout North America and Israel. In addition, screenings were held in Belarus (by Arnie Draiman and Bill Begal), Australia and South Africa. By 1995, more than 55,000 people had been tested. Feinberg's condition was rapidly deteriorating and only a partial match had been found. A friend in Milwaukee organized one last drive and teenager Becky Faibisoff, a 16-year-old girl from Illinois, was found to be a match. Feinberg received his successful transplant at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA.

The Gift of Life Marrow Registry

Feinberg's experience led him to devote his life to building a movement to educate and encourage people to add themselves to bone marrow registries around the world and improve the effectiveness and efficiency of donor Registry operations and strategy. The Gift of Life Marrow Registry, the Florida-based organization of which he is founder and CEO, seeks to increase ethnic diversity in the global donor pool. Because tissue type is inherited, a patient's best chance of finding a genetic match lies with those of similar background. The recruitment model Feinberg created for increasing the representation of Jewish donors in the registry during his own donor search, has since been replicated to help increase representation of donors of African America, Hispanic, Asian and Native American backgrounds. Feinberg helped the organization to become a world leader in its field.

Dr. Miriam and Sheldon G. Adelson Gift of Life - Be The Match Collection Center

In 2019, Feinberg led the establishment of the world's first registry-integrated stem cell collection center, based at Gift of Life's headquarters in Boca Raton, Florida. There were two reasons for this new facility. First, Feinberg wanted to re-engineer the donor experience, providing apheresis services in a non-hospital setting that provided donors with all the amenities of a spa-like experience. Second, to expedite the time to transplant for patients, by limiting the collection center solely to peripheral blood stem cell collections for the registry.

Awards

Trivia