The family of Kailee Wells faces an agonising two-day wait for the results of a DNA test after a man claiming to be the girl's biological father stepped forward.
Six-year-old Kailee was adopted by an American couple after being abandoned as a baby in rural Hunan province. But she is desperately ill with aplastic anaemia and doctors say a bone-marrow transplant is her only hope of survival. In an attempt to find a genetic match for Kailee, mother Linda Wells has travelled to China to track down her relatives.
The search appeared to have hit a brick wall until Mo Zhengde, 40, a shoe-maker from a rural village outside Chengde in Hunan, said Kailee could be his daughter.
Mrs Wells, who last night flew to Beijing with two vials of blood taken from the potential donor for DNA sampling, said she was 'cautiously optimistic'.
'His story matches up,' said Mrs Wells, 50, of New Mexico. 'But we have to wait for the results of a paternity test and further typing checks before we get too hopeful.'
In order for bone-marrow transplants to be successful, the donor has to be a perfect tissue match with the recipient. The Wells family has already run checks on nine million potential donors signed up to international registers, without success.
Mr Mo was found after a policeman, who had worked for seven years in the area where Kailee was abandoned, said he recalled a man and his pregnant partner splitting up. He said he believed their child was abandoned at about the same time as Kailee was found on January 14, 1997, near the Teacher's Training Institute in Changde.
