STUDENTS at Huddersfield New College have signed up to be potential lifesavers.

The college has joined forces with the charity Anthony Nolan to boost the number of people on the blood stem cell donor register.

Anthony Nolan matches volunteers willing to donate their blood stem cells to people with blood cancer in need of a lifesaving transplant.

Representatives from the charity signed up students and teachers to join the donor register at a special event at Huddersfield New College.

Staff at Huddersfield New College were inspired to hold a recruitment event after hosting Register and Be a Lifesaver (R&Be), Anthony Nolan’s education programme which teaches 17 and 18-year-olds about the importance of blood, organ and blood stem cell donation.

Ann O’Leary, R&Be manager at Anthony Nolan, says: "There are lots of myths about blood stem cell donation and R&Be aims to dispel those and encourage more people to register as donors.

"We’re absolutely delighted that Huddersfield New College are helping us to take our work one step further by holding this recruitment event.

"Our research has shown that the younger the donor, the better the outcome for the patient, so adding more students to the register will help us to save more lives."

The college has been a long-time supporter of Anthony Nolan and was among the first schools to hold a presentation shortly after the R&Be programme was launched in March 2009.

R&Be is run and funded by Anthony Nolan and was created thanks to a campaign by Adrian Sudbury, a journalist at the Huddersfield Examiner who had leukaemia and received a blood stem cell transplant.

After being told in May 2008 that his cancer had returned and he had just months to live, Adrian launched a successful campaign to raise awareness about donation.

He lobbied the Government for funds to start up an education programme and, as a result, R&Be was born. Adrian died in August 2008, aged 27.

Sadly he did not live to see the full success of R&Be, which now operates in London, Bristol, the Midlands, Merseyside and Yorkshire and has so far reached more than 50,000 young people.

To book an R&Be talk, please contact Katie Campling on Katie.campling@anthony nolan.org or 020 7284 8264.

To join the register donors must be aged 18 and need to fill in a form and give a saliva sample.

Visit www.anthonynolan.org/spit for more details.