Giving Life, Receiving Life

By Dave Andrusko

Last year, Patrizia Durante, now 27, learned she was suffering from acute myloid leukemia when she was two-thirds of the way through her first pregnancy. She told the National Post, "It was terrifying. I was afraid for the baby. I was afraid of dying and not being there for my daughter. It was very stressful and difficult for my family."

When she did not respond to moderate doses of chemotherapy, the doctors induced labor at 26 weeks so they could crank up the dosage without hurting her baby.

On September 2, 2001, Victoria was born. Weighing three-and-a-half pounds and two months premature, baby Victoria was placed in an incubator while Mrs. Durante renewed her chemotherapy.

By March, however, Mrs. Durante was so ill that doctors at Royal Victoria Hospital in British Columbia could wait no longer for a suitable donor for a bone-marrow transplant. At that point doctors took a calculated risk.

They infused Mrs. Durante with Victoria's umbilical cord blood, which had been frozen. (According to the Post, "umbilical-cord blood is usually banked for later use by the child should it develop a life-threatening illness such as leukemia.")

While clearly Mrs. Durante's body might have rejected the blood (because Victoria's blood was only a half-match; it carried her mother's genes as well as her father's), this might work to Mrs. Durante's benefit. As Dr. Pierre Laneuville, director of hematology at the McGill University Health Centre, told the Post,

"[I]n this case, the incompatibility--that is, the genes that the baby's dad contributed -- theoretically could have been very beneficial in this transplant.... There was the possibility that the immune system of the baby may identify the leukemia as foreign and attack." Which is exactly what happened.

As the Post described it, "The stem cells also flooded Mrs. Durante's bloodstream and stuck to her bone marrow -- the part of the body that manufactures the blood -- and began rebuilding her blood system." The stem cells also destroyed residual cancer cells, and seven months after the infusion Mrs. Durante is in complete remission.

"We're elated," Dr. Laneuville told the Post. "This is the best-case scenario we could possibly have imagined.... From a doctor's point of view, the chances are she's cured."

What makes umbilical cord blood so useful is that it is plentiful in the kind of stem cells (hemopoietic stem cells) that can rebuild a blood system that has taken a beating from mega-doses of chemotherapy. Preliminary results from animal studies to determine whether stem cells derived from cord blood can repair damaged heart and brain tissue are "promising," the newspaper also reported.

In Mrs. Durante's words, "I gave my daughter life, and then she gave mine back." She told the Post while cradling Victoria, "It's a miracle. She was meant to be born to save me. That's why we named her Victoria Angel. She's my little angel."

For pro-lifers, who've argued ceaselessly that there are morally unobjectionable alternatives to lethally extracting stem cells from human embryos, one of Dr. Laneuville's observations is especially poignant:

"We are now in an era where we are realizing scientifically and medically that we have sources of stem cells that can become other tissues and can be used therapeutically," he said. "And the most accessible source and the one we're throwing in the garbage all the time are these cord cells."