Thijs Slegers Receives 8,000 New Stem Cell Donor Registrations

More than 8,000 people have registered as stem cell donors after the appeal of PSV press officer Thijs Slegers, who announced two weeks ago that he had blood cancer and was no longer receiving treatment.

The Matchis Foundation already has more than 11,000 new registrations in 2023, this is the largest number of registrations the Matchis Foundation has seen in the early months of 2023.

Slegers has been suffering from acute leukemia, also known as blood cancer, for some time, as he announced on Twitter.

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After the press secretary of the football club PSV Eindhoven called on his followers to donate blood and stem cells, more than 2200 registrations were received by the Dutch center for stem cell donors Matchis in the beginning of February 2023.

Since the announcement of PSV press officer Thijs Slegers that he had been diagnosed with blood cancer, there has been a surge of over 8,300 individuals becoming registered as stem cell donors.

This is the largest number of registrations the Matchis Foundation has seen in the early months of 2023. In response to the overwhelming response, Matchis has planned an advertising campaign to be launched next week.

Through this campaign, they aim to promote the importance of actually having the stem cell donor process completed, as a person is only formally registered as a donor once they have sent in their set of cotton swabs containing mucus to be tested and verified as a suitable donor.

PSV appointed Slegers in June 2015 to succeed “Jeroen van den Berk” as press affairs manager on 1 July 2015. Before that, he worked as a sports journalist for the magazine “Voetbal International” , including as a ‘club watcher’ of the same club.

In August 2017 he suffered a cerebral infarction . At the end of October 2020, he was stricken with acute leukemia . Slegers received a stem cell transplant in 2022 . The operation was successful, but at the beginning of February 2023, Slegers announced via social media that the rejection that followed could not be stopped and that he had been treated.