In Malaysia, an estimated 50 children per annum suffering from a variety of haematological and inherited disorders would benefit from bone marrow or stem cell trans-plantation. By mendelian inheritance 25% of these children would be able to find a sibling who is a matched histocompatible donor. For the remaining 75% to have a chance at survival, search from another source would have to be made. This could mean a mismatched non-sibling related donor or a matched unrelated donor. We studied the chance of a Malaysian patient finding a matched sibling donor and a matched unrelated donor. Human Leucocyte Antigen (HLA) data from patients and their siblings were analysed. The HLA data were matched against the largest Asian bone marrow donor registry in Taiwan. 95% of the 138,744 donors in this registry come from Taiwanese Hokkien ancestry.