Huge Potential from Stem Cells Found in Umbilical Cord Blood

By Dave Andrusko

Although you would never know it by most press accounts, even while there is absolutely no track record of success using stem cells culled from human embryos, there is a lengthening history of extraordinary success using stem cells taken from ethically unobjectionable sources. The latest overview of this already-in- use alternative appeared in the August 20 edition of the Seattle Times.

Savannah Jantsch's fate seemed sealed five years ago. Just five years old, she was struggling both with leukemia and a rare blood disorder which left her unable to make crucial blood cells that help clot blood and heal injuries.

Savannah's parents took her to the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle. Doctors made her one of the early recipients of stem cells from a virtually unlimited source: umbilical-cord blood of newborns. (There are a number of cord blood banks around the country to whom mothers anonymously donate cord blood, including the Puget Sound Blood Center in Seattle.)

But before anything else could be done, her diseased cells had to be destroyed by massive doses of chemotherapy. Once her body was rid of this menace, on November 26, 1997, Savannah received her life-giving stem cell transplant, according to reporter Warren King.

King quotes Jeff Jantsch, Savannah's father, who said, "It's a resource that has given our daughter a whole news life." In fact, he added, "It's like she's been two different people with different lifestyles and a different existence."

The result of the infusion, King writes, is that "Savannah Jantsch is living proof of the healing power of [adult] stem cells, one of the basic building blocks of human tissue."

The story makes a larger point: adult stem cells are the "work horses of bone-marrow transplants - - they're embedded in the bone marrow - - they have been used for more than 30 years to treat several different types of leukemia and aplastic anemia." However, there is a new wrinkle. More and more, stem cells - - either from the patient or matched cells from a donor - - are used in lieu of bone marrow transplants.

The potential of adult stem cells appears extraordinary. Not only are they already being used to treat breast cancer, they are also employed against a number of other diseases in which the body is attacked by its own immune system - - "multiple sclerosis, scleroderma, and lupus," King reports.

King also interviewed Susan Stross, who for 17 years has lived with multiple sclerosis (MS). MS is characterized by the immune system's inexplicable attack on the insulation that surrounds nerve cells. Her condition was rapidly deteriorating until she underwent an experimental stem cell transplant at the Hutchinson Center three years ago.

Her disease has since stabilized, and according to her transplant physician, there have been "similar results in most of 25 other patients that have had the procedure at The Hutch." The next diseases eyed for possible transplants, King reports, are prostate and kidney cancers.

The University of Washington is humming with similar activities. There is adult stem cell research into "virtually every area of the body and a variety of diseases." These include the heart, fetal blood diseases, the eye, and even gene therapy.

Beverly Torok-Strobe is a scientist at the Hutchinson Center. Although she advocates using both fetal and adult stem cells in research, she is honest enough to admit that the near-term results have been overstated. "People get false hopes (with fetal stem cells) and the whole research field suffers," she told King.

And that doesn't even address the potentially very dangerous side effects. For example, King observes that fetal stem cells have been mixed with various growth factors to protect differing kinds of cells, "but no one knows how to control which cells they make and in what quantity."