Standing next to each other, Kayla Saikaly and Adi Versano looked like sisters. Their families marveled at the similarities both with dark hair and wearing peach-colored dresses. But not only are they unrelated, they live half a world apart.

"They are sisters, genetically," said Saikaly's mother, Samar.

Saikaly, 17, and Versano, 27, met for the first time Friday at City of Hope hospital in Duarte. Saikaly, who lives in Cerritos, suffers from aplastic anemia, a condition in which the bone marrow doesn't produce enough blood cells and cripples the immune system. Two years ago, her doctors told her that she needed a bone marrow transplant.

When neither her parents nor her brother were a match, a search in the international bone marrow registry found a donor in Israel Versano. The transplant was successful, and Saikaly is healthy and back in school.

Recipients in the United States aren't allowed to learn their donor's identity or communicate with them for a year. And even when they can talk to them, they often are separated by distance and don't meet. A tearful Saikaly said she was thrilled that Versano had come from Israel to meet her.

"I think it's important because you can at least say thank you, because it's the least you can do because there's no way you'll ever be able to repay them for what they did for you," Saikaly said.

Versano said that being a donor is "the most important thing you can do." Versano is an assistant kindergarten teacher who is studying to be a special education teacher. The hospital paid for her to come to California.

City of Hope has been hosting yearly reunions for bone marrow, stem cell and cord blood transplant recipients, donors and their families. About 4,000 people attended Friday's event, which featured music, face painting, a comedy show, a moon bounce, a popcorn stand and cartoonists drawing people's portraits.

The hundreds of transplant recipients who attended wore large buttons that displayed the time that has elapsed since their successful transplants. Volunteers cheered as they registered the patients and wrote the numbers on the buttons: "20 years! 100 days! 6 months!" People at the event noted the times on others' buttons, looking for people who have survived longer than themselves or their loved ones.

Some transplant recipients attended the event with their donors; others came with their family and have never met their "genetic twin."

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City of Hope hosts reunion of bone marrow donors, recipients

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