The Stanford students are rallying behind Cal grad Michelle Maykin in her battle against acute myeloid leukemia.

Project Michelle, organized by friends and family, has put together a local registration drive taking place today between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. in the Juniper room of Tresidder Union. The drive is part of a larger nationwide campaign to find a bone marrow match for Maykin, who was diagnosed with leukemia in 2007.

Born in Texas, Maykin grew up in the Bay Area and graduated from UC-Berkeley in 2004 with a double major in Business Administration and Political Economy. She recently became a member of the Stanford community when her boyfriend of six years, Van Le, was admitted to the Graduate School of Business this spring.

“She’s gone through chemotherapy before and this latest development is the impetus for the bone marrow transplant,” said Robbie Evans, a friend of Maykin’s who works at the Stanford Management Company. “This is a fairly recent development — [we learned about it] just a couple of weeks ago.”

Maykin’s friends and family have created Project Michelle in hopes of finding a donor match before June 21. Their goal is to register 15,000 new potential donors through hundreds of drives over the next six weeks.

But reaching that goal is not Project Michelle’s only challenge: organizers are especially looking to attract high numbers of Asian donors to match Maykin’s Chinese-Vietnamese-Thai background. Because tissue type is inherited, the best chance for a match is a donor with a similar ethnic background as the patient.

“The donor registry is really lacking in minority donors, especially Asians and Pacific Islanders,” Evans said.

“Asians, for cultural reasons and just because there are less of them, are less likely to participate,” said Phillip So ‘09, former community service chair for Asian interest fraternity Lambda Phi Epsilon, which is nationally affiliated with the Asian American Donors Program and holds several registration drives on campus. “Asian patients are much, much, much less likely to find a match.”

Evans said that while registration is always free for minorities, the Asian American Donor Program (AADP) has recently been providing financial support for Caucasians who register. After May 19, however, fees will be put back in place.

“Recently this organization has been underwriting the cost of testing,” Evans said. “It will still be free for minorities to register but for Caucasians there will be a fee incurred.”

While a match for Maykin will probably not be from a Caucasian donor, an increase in people who register may translate into more matches for other patients in need.

Stanford students, faculty and staff can help Michelle and others like her by registering today at Tresidder, at the Clark Building of the Stanford Medical School on May 23 or at any local registration drive.

In bone marrow drives, registrants are usually expected to complete a short health questionnaire and take a cheek cell swab that can be tested for tissue type. These samples are stored in a donor registry that will be used to help locate a match between donors and patients in need of a bone marrow transplant.