Precious Cargo

Marsha Williams ’81 crisscrosses the globe transporting hope in the form of bone marrow and stem cells.

By Melissa Babcock Johnson

veryone was anxious for the plane to land. But Marsha Williams ’81 needed it to. Someone’s life could depend on it.

The plane had been circling—along with more than 20 others—over its destination airport for more than an hour to allow severe thunderstorms to pass. But once the runways reopened, Williams’ pilot announced that the line to land was now too long for the amount of fuel left on the plane; it would be diverting to another airport. Williams would miss her connecting flight.

She could not miss that connecting flight.

Acting quickly, Williams handed a flight attendant the ace up her sleeve—a letter that read: “Marsha Williams is a trained courier carrying human cells for transplantation. It is imperative that the blood stem cells be transplanted without delay.”

Within minutes, the pilot made a new announcement: The flight would not be rerouted after all; the plane would be landing shortly.

Every year, thousands of people are diagnosed with life-threatening blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma. For some patients, the best treatment is a blood stem cell transplant from a healthy donor whose DNA proteins and markers match theirs. NMDP (formerly Be The Match/National Marrow Donor Program) manages the world’s most diverse registry to help patients find their match.

The field has come a long way since the organization facilitated its first bone marrow transplant in 1987. Before then, most donors and patients were related. However, 70% of patients don’t have a fully matched donor in their family. Through NMDP’s blood stem cell donor registry, unrelated donors and patients can be matched across state lines and even international borders.

To ensure those potentially life-saving and delicate blood stem cells securely reach their intended recipient in time, they are hand-carried—sometimes thousands of miles—by volunteer medical couriers like Williams.

CORPORATE TO COURIER

Back in 2007, Williams, who double majored in psychology and English at Conn, was loving her corporate job as senior vice president of brand and consumer insights at Nickelodeon in New York City. But the long hours of intense market research and growing number of consumer insights presentations to ad sales and licensing partners were beginning to burn her out. She took a week off to join a Habitat for Humanity build in the Dominican Republic, fulfilling a long-held desire to help others. She loved it, she says. “I thought, ‘This is how I can volunteer.’”

But the little free time Williams had from her demanding career was precious, and it didn’t necessarily lend itself to volunteering. “Evenings and weekends were all about recovery, restoration and recharging,” she explains. “I did that build, and I thought I could do it one week a year—take a vacation and volunteer. But then I totally burned out and decided I needed to step away from corporate altogether.”

She moved home to Cincinnati and started her own market research business, Harvest Research Group LLC. She kept Nickelodeon as a client and added Lego, Discovery Networks, DreamWorks Animation TV, the Oprah Winfrey Network and more. But she was still looking for ways to give back.

She learned about medical courier opportunities by chance while on a hike more than a decade ago. Having been away from Cincinnati for more than 25 years, Williams had sought ways to reconnect with her hometown and joined a hiking MeetUp group. She noticed another member wearing a hat with the Be The Match logo. Williams approached him and mentioned she was in the donor registry.

“It turned out he was a courier for NMDP—the first courier in the Cincinnati area,” Williams recalled. “I said, ‘What does a courier do? What does that mean?’ And so, over the course of this hike, he explained volunteer couriers transport bone marrow or stem cells from wherever the donor is to wherever the patient is. I was like, ‘Oh, this sounds like something I would love to do.’”

I love that science keeps advancing and allowing for more success with cell therapy.

Marsha Williams ’81

The combination of travel and a flexible volunteer opportunity sounded perfect to Williams. Her fellow hiker connected her with NMDP, which began its extensive vetting process. “It’s not the kind of volunteer job where you say, ‘I’d like to volunteer,’ and they say, ‘Come on in and start,’” Williams says. “It’s almost like job hunting. You apply, interview and provide references. Then if you get approved, you have to pay for training out of pocket as a show of good faith and responsibility.”

She began training in January of 2014, then passed the exam. “If you pass the test, congratulations, you’re a courier,” she says. “They send you a medical cooler, and they teach you how to prep and sterilize it. If you get assigned a trip, you’ve got the cooler ready, they send you the paperwork you need and off
you go.”

Couriers mostly carry bone marrow or stem cells collected through a process called apheresis, and sometimes plasma or T-cells. The harvested biological material must be kept within a specific temperature range in the specially manufactured, thermally protected medical transporter. The cooler can hold the proper temperature range for up to 96 hours. Couriers typically pick up cells from a hospital or clinic at the donor’s location and deliver them to one at the patient’s location, Williams explains. The door-to-door journey cannot exceed 48 hours, or the biological matter will begin to break down.

“You start off with domestic trips. If you’re interested in international, you have to do domestic for two years without any mistakes,” Williams explains. “Now I go all over the globe, and it is so cool.”

Williams has traveled to countries she might never have otherwise visited, she says, including Norway, Poland, Austria, Chile and Israel, which Williams says popped up a lot when she first began as a courier. The second largest Jewish population in the world after Israel is in the United States, so Jewish Americans are often matched with someone in Israel.

Couriers picking up must be in the donor’s country at least 48 hours before the cells are extracted so the cooler can be fully prepped and reach the correct temperature. Usually, couriers picking up get the two days before collecting the donation to prep the cooler and themselves for the pick-up, as well as to sightsee or otherwise experience the locale, and couriers dropping off overseas get two days afterward.

A RACE AGAINST TIME

Williams recently retired, giving her even more time to help save lives. Strict patient confidentiality rules mean she keeps dates and other identifying specifics of her trips under wraps. Most go off without a hitch, but what she can share about the ones that don’t is riveting.

Several years ago, when Williams was trying to fly back to the U.S. from Europe with stem cells, a bomb cyclone hit. East Coast airports were closed, but the airport where Williams was scheduled to land at 11:30 p.m. was set to reopen at 9:30 p.m., so her flight took off as planned.

Before the plane had even left the runway, its entertainment system crashed, meaning none of the monitors could display flight tracking details. “It seemed as if everyone went to sleep except me,” Williams says. “I watched Netflix from my iPad, determined to stay awake and reset back to Eastern time.”

Because the flight tracker was down, no one realized the pilot flew as far as Greenland before turning around and heading back to Europe—the U.S. destination airport never reopened, and international airports south of the storm were filled with other planes that had flown back believing they’d be able to land, too. So about eight hours after takeoff, Williams was right back where she started: on a different continent from the patient who needed the donor material she was carrying.

“I was now on the clock in a big way, having lost a whole day,” Williams says. “It was also daybreak the next morning in Europe, and I had not slept a wink. I discovered another courier on that flight in the exact same position.”

Just like before, Williams had to inform the airline she was carrying precious cargo in order to be rebooked with priority on a flight that would avoid the East Coast all together.

“Ultimately, I made it to my destination hospital with about three hours left on that 48-hour clock,” she says.

The occasional heart-pounding rush is well worth it for Williams, who is proud to play an integral role in getting patients the care they need.

“I love the fact that the success rate keeps improving,” she says. “Since I became a courier, the research has [shown] that stem cell transplants can also help put some autoimmune diseases into remission. I love that science keeps advancing and allowing for more success with cell therapy.”

Marsha Williams ’81 at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, her home base of operations for courier missions. Photos on location by Sean D. Elliot.