My apologies for the long hiatus! Its been very busy here at StemLife and I was reminded by colleagues that the StemLife blog was in need of my attention and that they were keen on knowing what news there was to share. The world of stem cell technology does not rest and whilst the recent events of war in the world have grabbed headline news, patients and stem cell followers have also had their fair share of updates.
In addition to the cord blood stem cell derived insulin secreting cell blog entry that I just published, I did see two other articles which I thought worthy of a mention.
ONE: Well done Dr. Suradej Hongeng in Thailand who has performed Thailand's first and most complicated triple stem cell (2 cord blood units + bone marrow from patient's mother) donor transplant for Thalassemia major. At only seven years old, the little boy who underwent the transplant at Ramathibodi hospital is already considered well enough after only 2 months in hospital. The cord blood units were only 80% matched with the patient's tissue type but the transplanted stem cells were well accepted and functioned after just 5 weeks post transplant.
In previous work, Ramathibodi had successfully treated 10 patients with blood disorders or cancers using cord blood stem cells from only one donor but has performed about 430 bone marrow transplants since the program commenced in 1989 according to Saengsuree Jootar. The limiting factors are almost rhetorical- high costs of the procedure ranging from Bt 300,000 to Bt 700,000 (approx. MYR 30K to 70K) and the well known challenges of finding a matching donor. The hospital does run a charity program of free transplants in honour of the Queen, in which 34 patients have already benefitted from the procedure.
TWO: Remember the Gary Schaer trial for heart that I keep mentioning? Well, in the last entry I asked how Rev. Eugene Carter was doing and I got my answer (it would be nice if he's decided to answer us because of the question posed in this blog!). He's doing just fine :)
EXCERPT:Last February, Carter needed his faith when he had a heart attack. He says, "I believe that anything that comes my way is there for a reason." So when doctors asked him to be in a study on stem cells just days after his heart attack, he said yes.
"The promise of stem cells is the promise that these cells could be given to grow new parts of the body that have been damaged," Gary Schaer, M.D., an interventional cardiologist at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago, tells Ivanhoe.
Dr. Schaer and colleagues are giving heart attack patients stem cells from a healthy adult donor. The cells are delivered through an IV. Once infused, they zero in on damaged heart muscle and repair it. Stem cells have shown great promise in fixing damaged heart muscle in pigs.
"I have been doing this for a little more than 20 years, and this is the most exciting new development in a very exciting field," Dr. Schaer says. Studies have shown using a patient's own stem cells can treat heart failure. He says using a donor's stem cells to treat heart attacks is a new frontier.
Carter feels lucky to be part of the study. "What an opportunity to do something positive," he says, and if the treatment helps, he'll have even more to preach about.
Excellent news. Okay, now back to StemLife work!
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