Mandi Schwartz, who plays hockey for Yale University, currently is fighting a second bout with leukemia and needs a stem-cell transplant to survive.

Mandi's brothers Rylan and Jaden will play hockey at Colorado College this fall.

While her doctors have found a partially matched bone-marrow donor, that particular therapy can result in a life-threatening graft-versus-host (GVH) response if the donor cells recognize the recipient as foreign.

Cord blood offers the same stem cells but rarely causes a life-threatening GVH response.

Mandi’s biggest challenge is that the Schwartz family, of Wilcox, Saskatchewan, is of Russian, Ukrainian and German descent. They need to find someone with a similar background to be the proper match.

The campaign to help Mandi, spearheaded by Dr. Tedd Collins of Connecticut, is reaching out to people globally. Yale, USA Hockey, Hockey Canada, the NCAA, ESPN, the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF), the NHL, Sirius Satellite radio (NHL Home Ice/channel 208) and ABC News all have joined in the effort to spread the word and ultimately locate a match.

“I’m really happy,” Collins said of the widespread response, “not only because it’s going to help Mandi, but also because it’s going to change the way things have been being done – that’s the great thing. I’ve really committed myself to this (working with cord-blood donors) until the day I die.”

Collins lost his daughter Natasha, a Yale Medical School student of mixed race, in August 2009 to GVH disease after a bone-marrow transplant that did not closely enough match her genetic makeup. He and his wife, Anne, subsequently founded www.BecomeMyHero.org to “ensure that mixed heritage families and individuals receive equal access to the life-saving potential of effectively safe stem-cell transplants.”

Additional information on the “Become Mandi’s Hero” campaign is available at: http://www.BecomeMandisHero.org.