Seun Adebiyi

At just 26-years-old Seun Adebiyi is one of the most driven individuals you will ever meet. Seun has achieved nearly every life goal he has set for himself. He has a couple big ones left and sadly not a lot of time. A Nigerian Yale Law School graduate, Seun was diagnosed with leukemia while training for the 2014 Olympic Winter Games last year. Now his goal is to register 10,000 people as bone marrow donors with DKMS, the largest bone marrow donor center in the world. His mission is to not only save his own life, but to save thousands of others, like himself in need of a life-saving transplant.

Born in Nigeria, Seun moved to Alabama with his mother when he was just six years old. Against all odds, he got accepted and graduated from Yale Law School and secured a high powered position as an operations analyst with Goldman Sachs in Salt Lake City. His life-long childhood dream is to compete in the Olympics. For years, Seun swam competitively. He missed qualifying for the 2004 Summer Games by a tenth of a second in the 50-meter freestyle.

Frustrated by the near miss and yet more determined than ever, Seun researched alternate events that would be less competitive in Nigeria. Winter sports aren’t big in a country without any actual winter. Skeleton, an event where you lie on your stomach and ride a sled at absurd speeds down a twisting course seemed the ticket. He had never been on a sled, but that didn’t stop him (Salt Lake City happens to be one of two places in the country with a facility to practice skeleton.)

Last June, 3 months after he began training for the skeleton, Seun was diagnosed with lymphoblastic lymphoma and stem-cell leukemia, two rare aggressive blood cancers. Seun has been receiving chemotherapy treatments for weeks now, but was told that his only chance for survival is a bone marrow transplant. Without any full siblings, Seun has to rely on the kindness of strangers to find him a life-saving match. Sadly, there is a colossal shortage of minority donors in the national registry. Only eight percent of the seven million registered donors are African American which means that only seventeen percent of African Americans in need of a transplant will receive one.

Each year, more than 140,000 people are diagnosed with a blood cancer, such as leukemia or lymphoma. Less than 30% of patients can find a match in their own family; the other 70% must search for an unrelated donor. Sadly, only 3 out of 10 patients will receive the transplant that could save their lives.

Seun is determined to improve the odds of finding a donor for patients in need of a bone marrow transplant.