THREE high school students from Shenzhen-based Vanke Meisha Academy recently bagged a prize in a competition at the 2022 China HOSA National Leadership Conference for their short video titled “Bone Marrow Donation Needs Everyone,” Shenzhen Evening News reported.

China HOSA is a chartered association of a global student-led organization, HOSA-Future Health Professionals, whose mission is to improve health services delivery to the general public.

The work by Zhang Jiarong, Kuang Chuyue and Li Yukun from Shenzhen was given the National Excellence Honor in the public service announcement competition.

It was an online program raising funds for patients suffering from hematologic neoplasms that aroused those students’ attention to bone marrow donations.

“Some patients are of our age. What would their life be, if graft versus host disease (GvHD) happens after bone marrow transplants and they must stay in the hospital for years,” Kuang told the News.

Ever since then, the three teenagers, who shared similar interests in biomedical sciences, started researching hematologic diseases and marrow transplants, studying State regulations on organ and blood donation, and acquiring information about the living conditions of blood tumor patients.

“People always have concerns about the side effects of bone marrow aspiration and the public’s willingness to become potential donors is low,” Kuang said. “However, unrelated-donor blood stem cell donation allows the collection of peripheral stem cells or umbilical blood in China, which can avoid bone marrow aspiration. Moreover, hematopoietic stem cells’ great ability to self-renew makes the donations safe.”

To promote bone marrow donations and dispel the public’s misunderstandings, the trio, who also shoot videos as a hobby, decided to make a public service announcement on the issue.

The 30-second video adopted elements from video games, time-travel dramas and VR technology to spice up science-popularization content. “We presented scenarios before surgery in black and white, and the recovery in colors to catch the audiences’ eyes. Knowledge concerning bone marrow donations was also attached at the end of the video,” Kuang said.

The award-winning announcement received high marks from the organizing committee of China HOSA, saying that “it will be beyond a beneficial project when you make a real change with your actions.”

(Xia Yuanjie)