Anthony Nolan is a UK charity that focuses on leukaemia and Hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. It manages and recruits donors to one of the three bone marrow registers in the United Kingdom; the other registries are the British Bone Marrow Registry run by the National Blood Service and the Welsh Bone Marrow Donor Registry run by the Welsh Blood Service. It also carries out research to help make bone marrow transplants more effective.
The charity is named after Anthony Nolan (born 1971, died 1979), who did not suffer from leukaemia but from Wiskott-Aldrich syndrome, a rare inherited blood disorder. It was founded by Anthony's mother Shirley (1942–2002) in 1974 as the "Anthony Nolan Register". Initially based at the Westminster Children's Hospital, it moved to St Mary Abbot's Hospital in 1978 and to its present offices, laboratory and research institute in north London, in the grounds of the Royal Free Hospital. The charity was renamed in 2001 to the "Anthony Nolan Trust". and again in 2010 to "Anthony Nolan".
It is a priority for Anthony Nolan to recruit more male donors because men can generally provide greater volumes of blood stem cells than female donors. This helps faster engraftment and the reconstitution of the immune system post-transplant. If there is a choice of donor for a patient in most cases a male donor will be preferred. It is also the only register in the UK to allow gay men to join, subject to their normal criteria for inclusion.
A student organisation operating in universities throughout the UK known as Marrow works with Anthony Nolan to raise awareness of the charity and blood cancers within universities and their local communities. It was set up in 1998 at Nottingham University and is now in 39 universities in the UK and worldwide.
The Midland Metro has a tram named after Anthony Nolan.
Daniel De Gale (1987–2008), a leukaemia patient, inspired his mother Beverley and her partner, Orin Lewis, to set up the African-Caribbean Leukaemia Trust in June 1996. ACLT worked "in partnership with the ... Nolan Trust" to build the number of bone marrow donors, specifically of African, African Caribbean, and mixed parentage on the UK register.
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