The #MatchforLara campaign has continued to gather large amounts of support across the country, in the wake of a major recruitment drive for stem cell donors in Cambridge last week.

The campaign was launched following the diagnosis of 24-year-old Lara Casalotti with leukaemia in December 2015, and her family’s discovery that her brother Seb, a student at Magdalene, was not a match.

They were then informed that finding a donor match would be very difficult because of Lara’s Thai-Italian heritage. She is undergoing intensive chemotherapy at University College Hospital, London, but finding a matching stem cell donor is her only chance of survival.

Since the campaign’s launch, it has attracted widespread support, with Tulip Siddiq, MP for Lara’s home constituency of Hampstead and Kilburn, asking David Cameron to “send a message of support to those working to keep Lara alive” at PMQs on Wednesday, which he did.

The Anthony Nolan charity, which supports those with blood cancer, has seen a five-fold increase in the number of new applicants to its register since the launch of the campaign, which it described as “unprecedented”.

Currently, only 0.5 per cent of donors on the Anthony Nolan register are from East Asian backgrounds, with 1.5 per cent from European backgrounds, and similar shortages of donors from ethnic minorities are common throughout the world.

This means that only 20 per cent of people from black, Asian and ethnic minority backgrounds who need a stem cell transplant will ever find a perfect match.

Ann O’Leary, Head of Register Development at Anthony Nolan, described Lara as “a truly inspirational and selfless young woman”, and emphasised that “somewhere out there, there’s a potential lifesaver who could give her a lifeline by donating their stem cells”.

She also claimed that what “many people don’t realise how easy it is” to join the register, stressing that “it simply involves filling in a form and providing a saliva sample”, and that “If you’re one of the privileged few who goes onto donate, 90 per cent of the time this will now take place via an outpatient appointment”.

Lara’s brother Seb has urged people to sign up, saying: “there’s no time to put this off or think ‘I’ll do it next week’. That could be too late for Lara. Please do it today.”