A man from Hubei province donated hematopoietic stem cells to save a patient in Italy and became the 125th Chinese to donate the cells for foreigners, Beijing Daily reported on Tuesday.

Liang Xiao, 31, resident of Xiangyang, Hubei province, registered in the bone marrow bank in June, 2012 when he donated blood in his hometown.

He received a phone call from the blood bank in Hubei in July telling him that an ethnic Chinese patient in Italy needed his hematopoietic stem cells. The cells are present in blood and bone marrow.

Liang donated the cells every Monday for two months in a Beijing hospital.

Medics from the Italian blood bank came to Beijing on Tuesday to collect Liang’s donation.