The Don Margolis Blog

I sometimes find stories involving cord blood stem cell transplants in which a patient uses a brother's, sister's or other family member's cord blood.  However, it is very rare to find an adult stem cell therapy story in which a patient (in this case a young baby) uses his/her own cord blood stem cells for treatment. Luckily for this baby, the parents had banked her stem cells taken from her umbilical cord at birth.

Chloe Levine is the star here.  At the tender age of 9 months, she was diagnosed with cerebral palsy and if not for the help of adult stem cells,  was destined for 17-18 years of therapy according to her neurologist.  Read on:

That was when the Levines heard about an experimental procedure at Duke University in North Carolina where children with cerebral palsy were infused with their own cord blood stem cells in an effort to heal and repair damaged brain tissue.

The Levine's remembered they had banked Chole's cord blood when she was born.

“It was a miracle, Alvarez said Monday on FOX & Friends. “I congratulate you for banking her cord blood. Stem cells are a new field of medicine and they certainly can rejuvenate the tissue.

Two months ago, Chloe, 2, received an infusion of her own stem cells and her progress is remarkable, said her father, Ryan Levine.

“Her therapist said she's made a 50 percent recovery, he said. “She can walk, run, and do sign language with her right hand.

“It's a miracle, agreed Jenny Levine. “To hear your baby's voice is a gift.

Alvarez said all parents expecting babies should consider cord blood banking.

“There is no downside, this is material we used to throw away, he said. “And while the blood is most useful for the child it came from, it can sometimes be used for siblings. This is a science that is evolving more and more.

And surprisingly enough, all of this took place in the United States (Duke University)- not China, Costa Rica etc. where we normally hear of such stem cell therapies.

Click here to read this happy story

United States, Canada, Vietnam and now South Africa-  all of these stem cell success stories really get me pumped! I really love to read stories about people like Rebecca:

Pretty little Rebecca Stringer has become the poster girl for the Sunflower Fund in KwaZulu-Natal.

For, while several local children have sadly died of leukemia, six-year-old Rebecca's story is a success.

She, like the others, was in desperate need of a life-saving bone marrow transplant, but luckily for Rebecca of Hillcrest, she was able to find a stem cell donor.


But in July 2007, the doctor told the Stringers that their daughter had relapsed, and that the only way for her to be healed was to find a bone marrow stem cell donor and undergo an urgent transplant.

But the chances of finding a bone marrow stem cell donor match is 1:100 000 and the South African Bone Marrow Registry (SABMR) at present sits at some 63 000 donors.

The Stringers then mounted a campaign to get as many people as possible to sign up as donors-and amazingly, a suitable one was found very quickly. Many patients die while waiting for a donor. -

While I commonly post news stories about these stem cell transplants, please remember that these stories aren't the norm.  Unfortunately, many cancer patients die while trying to find a matching donor which is all the more reason for you to register at www.marrow.org.

Click here to read the whole fantastic story!

Recently, we have highlighted some successful stem cell treatments in Canada and United States dealing with leukemia patients.  Today, I am happy to say that Vietnam is getting into the act:

Vietnam has been successful in performing the first marrow transplant, Vietnam News Agency on Wednesday quoted the announcement of country's Central Hematology and Blood Transfusion Institute as reporting.

The transplant was operated on Nguyen Thi Lan, a local 21-year-old leukemia sufferer, and the donor of blood-forming stem cell was her elder sister.

After two-month treatment, Lan has been discharged from the institute in a normal health condition. Tests no longer found cancer cells, and her marrow is reported to be normal.

The institute's vice director Bach Quoc Khanh said a new method of chemical treatment was used in the transplant to enable the patient to accept cells resistant to cancer. The new method also helped reduce the risk of side-effects such as infection and bleeding which can lead to the patient's death.

Click here for the full article

Repair Stem Cell SAB Member Zannos Grekos is in the news again!  -- Dr. Grekos was a featured speaker at the 16th Annual World Congress on Anti-Aging Medicine & Regenerative Biomedical Technologies at the Gaylord National Resort in Washington, DC, on Friday, July 18.  And what did he have to say?  Let's take a look:

"I've seen patients go from an ejection fraction of 28 percent to 49 percent in six months with the stem cell therapy," he told the captive audience. (An ejection fraction of 50 is normal.) "Injecting a patient's own stem cells into damaged tissue is replacing damaged cells with normal functioning cells.

The group was particularly fascinated with the center's research proving that adult stem cells have the ability to engraft themselves into areas damaged by myocardial infarction (heart attacks) and turn into new heart cells and new blood vessels.

Dr. Grekos responded to the forum by stating, "Three months after treatment, cardiac nuclear scans of the areas treated reveal reversal of damage. In some cases, it's virtually impossible to identify the problems that existed before therapy. We have shown such improvement in some patients that they were taken off the heart transplant list."

This is good news.  More proof that adult (repair) stem cells do work!  For more on Dr. Grekos and his stem cell treatments- click here

For the full article- click here

This probably isn't news to our Dr. Carlos Lima, but it may be good news for spinal cord injury victims coming across this blog or website for the first time.  -  MIT researchers along with the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm have found that spinal cord stem cells that are grown/multiplied in a lab and then reintroduced into the injury site can restore some physical function in paralyzed rodents and primates.

More:

"We have been able to genetically mark this neural stem cell population and then follow their behavior. We find that these cells proliferate upon spinal cord injury, migrate toward the injury site and differentiate over several months," study author Konstantinos Meletis said in an MIT news release.

This isn't too surprising to me as it seems they have proven (or on the way to proving) that adult stem cells do their job of repairing when introduced into an injury  site in a large amount.

For more on stem cells for spinal cord injuries- click here

For the full article mentioned above- click here

Yesterday, I presented the miraculous story of Chris LoDuca- a man no longer suffering from cancer thanks to a bone marrow stem cell transplant from an anonymous donor at the time. (See yesterday's story below- they met for the first time recently).

Today, I present a letter from a woman who was also saved in a similar fashion. Tiffany Hooper wrote this letter to the editor of her local newspaper. Read it and think about what you can do to help:

Dear Editor,

I am a wife, stepmom, daughter, sister, and I am a 2-time survivor of acute leukemia.

I was diagnosed in 2002 and after chemotherapy and nearly five years in remission relapsed last October. Without a bone marrow transplant I believe there was no hope for my long-term survival. I think about what those words mean, would have meant, to my family¦no hope.

Like over 70% of patients in need of bone marrow or stem cells I had no donor match within my family. I needed the gift of an unrelated donor. And, in January in intensive care, “hope was delivered.

I can thank the doctors, nurses, and the other staff of the transplant team, but I can never truly thank the biggest hero, my anonymous marrow donor, who somewhere in the world made the choice to join a donor registry.

In a small attempt to “pay it forward I'd like to urge, better yet beg, your readers to visit www.onematch.ca or call 1 888 2 DONATE for information on joining the registry and becoming a potential donor. If people would like to ask me questions about my experience to help in making a decision they can email me at tjhrh@sympatico.ca.

What if you knew you were a match, right now, for someone whose life is being stolen by cancer or another marrow disease, and your donation could save them? If it were your spouse, your child, or your parent, what wouldn't you do?

Sincerely,

Tiffany Hopper

Petawawa, Ontario

I can never get too many of these stories. Every time I read them, the
tears want to start flowing. Cancer patient (chronic myelogenous
leukemia) Chris LoDuca, was dying and in desperate need of a stem cell
transplant. He had been waiting for a possible donor for more than 1
year. Lots of cancer victims pass away waiting for a matching donor,
but Chris was lucky. Around the world, there was a matching donor in
Germany - Manuel Raisch.  Manuel generously donated his stem cells to
a man he had never met.  These repair stem cells would save Chris'
life. And now, more than 3 years later, they met for the very first time. Chris and his wife were  overwhelmed by the moment:

With the co-operation of LoDuca's wife Pam, it(the first meeting of Chris and Manuel) was kept a surprise until the annual Camp 4 Compassion on a farm near Leamington that promotes awareness of the worldwide blood and bone marrow donation registry.
LoDuca was told he had to be there for a belated 40th birthday party.
Instead, he came face-to-face with Manuel Raisch, a tall, bearded 27-year-old theology student from Wiesenbach who spoke little English.
"I was in complete shock," said LoDuca. "I was overwhelmed."
"Sitting next to me is a real hero," he said.
How many ways can you say thank-you? LoDuca can tell you all about that now.
The tears quietly streaming down his wife's face perhaps said it best.

Click here for the whole thing Sorry, - link was removed. Click here for the same story, but edited differently

I am taking a few days off from blogging (I will be back Monday), but since I won't be updating this site, I wanted to leave you something special to read while I am away.

The Family Research Council has compiled a list of adult stem cell treatment success stories from January 2008 until June 2008.  You may recognize some of the names on the list because I have featured many of them on this blog.  However, the Family Research Council deserves a round of applause for putting all of the stem cell treatment victories all together in an easy to read form:

We are pleased to present FRC's June update on advances in human treatments and research with adult stem cells.  This is the third report.  The prior ones were "Adult Stem Cell Success Stories - 2006"[2] and "Adult Stem Cell Success Stories-2007 Update".[3]   Every six months, we will present new cases of people being helped by adult stem cells, which are abundant throughout the human body and whose use does not pose the ethical dilemmas encountered with embryonic stem cell research.  Adult stem cells are already being used to treat over 73 different conditions and are the subject of over 1400 FDA approved trials.  We invite you to read about real people being helped by adult stem cell research.

Click here to read about these real people who have been helped by repair stem cells- I guarantee you will be happy you did 

This is another good story that shows if you have had a heart attack or have some form of heart disease- congestive heart failure, coronary artery disease, etc. - you aren't necessarily condemned to a life of shortness of breath, low energy, and watching your fluid intake.  Stem cell treatment (your own stem cells)  CAN help your heart:

"I woke up at 11:30 to a heart attack and I just tried to dismiss it."

But David Varino couldn't.  He later had triple bypass surgery, a number of stints, a pacemaker and defibulator put into the heart that doctors described as trash.

Then in May, David was told about experimental research being done in Covington, where his own stem cells would be used to hopefully repair his heart.

"I was very skeptial," Varino explains. "You say stem cells and people immediately put up a red flag. I did too. I told my family no. Then i was told it was going to be my own."

David soon became known as "Number Six". Doctors used his bone marrow and withdrew 15 hundred stem cells. Those were cultivated those into 15 million and then deposited them into David's arteries.

"I was thinking, 'If it can only buy me a month'".

And now two months later, "Number Six's" children confirm, their father is breathing better, can now walk across the room and is everyday getting closer to his normal life.

"It's done something wonderous, I'll tell you that cause before I could not do anything. I don't know how long it will last. Hopefully a long time. Right now, I feel good; I feel really good. There's no doubt in my mind that this is how they will treat major illnesses in the future."  

Yes, David, there is no doubt in my mind either.  However, my goal is to make the "future" sooner rather than later so thousands of others just like you can have the same second chance that you did!  These are your own stem cells we are talking about- no side effects and no moral issues.

Click here for the full article

Yet another success story that says cancer (multiple myeloma) isn't necessarily a death sentence due to repair stem cell treatment.  In this case, the stem cells came to the rescue in the form of a bone marrow (stem cell) transplant from the cancer patient's sister:

The ties holding the Geprey family together remain strong -- now two of the nine siblings are truly blood relatives.

Luann Magolan, of Oregon Township, gave her sister Chris Gepfrey Dahlke, 14 million cells to save her life from a rare form of cancer. Multiple myeloma affects the plasma cells in the bone marrow and is destroying her bones.

"It was determined that she needed a stem cell transplant," Magolan said. "Blood stem cells are produced in your bone marrow. The cancer took over those stem cells and they broke apart. The marrow can't produce and you get weak bones."

As she heals, Chris and her husband Craig live in Ann Arbor to be near the hospital. With the cells of her sister inside her, Chris grows stronger each day. (YES!!!- DM)

This is the reason why I keep urging my readers (yes you!) to register as a bone marrow transplant donor.  You could save a life of someone you love or more likely someone you don't know.  Imagine the feeling of saving someone's life.  Go to www.bonemarrow.org and find out how you can register.

Click here for the full news story