“The Match” chronicles the quest of a family on Long Island with a daughter with a deadly disease and one astonishing chance to cure her: create the perfect sibling.
Katie Trebing was born with Diamond Blackfan anemia, which robbed her body of the ability to make red blood cells. Monthly blood transfusions could keep Katie alive for a few decades, but the disease would likely kill her by the time she reached her 40s unless she had a bone marrow transplant from a sibling who had inherited the exact same portion of DNA from the same parents.
The family didn’t have an exact-match sibling. So doctors offered the Trebings an extraordinary alternative: with the help of fertility doctors and geneticists, Steve and Stacy Trebing used a technology called IVF with PGD to create embryos and then select the ones that would create a child who would be a match for their sick daughter. Only those embryos were implanted in Stacy Trebing’s uterus.
This child, called a donor or savior child, provided his sister with the bone marrow that cured her. Newsday followed the Trebing family from the selection of the embryo through the birth of the donor/savior sibling, through the bone marrow transplant. Katie Trebing is now nearly 5 and is cured, and donor brother Christopher is 2.
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