Two bone marrow drives will be held this weekend for 18-year-old Sarah Ruiz, who has been diagnosed with acute leukemia.

The recent Mililani High School graduate is hoping to find a perfect match to save her life with a transplant.

The drives will be from 6 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. today and 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. tomorrow at St. John Apostle and Evangelist Catholic Church, 95-370 Kuahelani Ave. in Mililani.

The Hawaii Bone Marrow Registry is using a “;buccal swab”; technique to register donors. A sample is collected by swabbing the cheek cells inside a donor's mouth. The samples are sent to the National Marrow Donor Program repository for testing and storage.

Donors must be between 18 and 60 years old and in good general health. People only need to register once.

To obtain or update information, call the Registry at 547-6154. Neighbor Island residents can call toll-free at (877) 443-6667 or see the national Web site: http://www.marrow.org.

Since the Hawaii Bone Donor Registry was founded in 1989, it has recruited about 68,000 registered donors in Hawaii, Guam and American Samoa. More than 251 have donated bone marrow or blood stem cells for patients worldwide.

Only 30 percent of patients find matching donors within their families so unrelated matches are needed to save lives, registry officials say. Matches are more easily found between people of the same ethnic background.