Our story begins in 1991, when our founder, Dr. Peter Harf, lost his wife Mechtild to leukemia. Peter promised his wife to help everyone in need of a stem cell donation to find a matching donor.
At that time, there were only 3,000 potential stem cell donors available in Germany. Peter founded DKMS Germany, and within just one year the number of potential donors increased to 68,000
This was reason enough for our founder to believe in his vision – to delete blood cancer and to give every blood cancer patient a second chance at life. In 2004, we embarked on our international journey by establishing offices in the Americas, and we continued the expedition with openings in 2009 in Poland, in 2011 in Spain and in 2013 in the UK.