Bone marrow donors may be compensated for their donations.

This ruling will increase the odds of patients finding matches when in need of transplants, which must be a genetic match.

The court said that new technologies for transplanting bone marrow make the tissue more like blood and less like an organ.

The National Organ Transplant Act prohibits compensation for human organs, such as kidneys, but allows payment for renewable tissues such as blood.

A California nonprofit MoreMarrowDonors.org, sued U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in 2009, challenging the ban on compensation for bone marrow donations.

They argued that allowing financial incentives for bone marrow donation was crucial because of the extreme difficulty of finding a genetic match.

The suit said the ban violated the U.S. Constitution because it treated bone marrow as a “human organ” while allowing payments for blood, sperm and eggs.