Bone Marrow Transplants

Jeanne Larner is pleading with her medical insurance company to pay for a bone-marrow transplant she believes will greatly increase her odds of conquering a fast-growing brain tumor. "All I need is a chance, and I can get better," said Larner, 24, who is under treatment at Children's Hospital of Orange County, a medical center with expertise in bone-marrow transplants. Larner's physician, Dr.

E. Donnall Thomas, a physician who pioneered the use of bone marrow transplants in leukemia patients and won the 1990 Nobel Prize in medicine, died Saturday in Seattle of heart disease. He was 92. The Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, which Thomas joined in 1974, announced his death. Thomas' work is among the greatest success stories in the treatment of cancer. Bone marrow transplantation and its sister therapy, blood stem cell transplantation, have improved the survival rates for patients with some blood cancers to around 90% from almost zero.

Hanh Truong's well-wishers lined up like lottery players Tuesday, each baring a vein on the 1-in-100,000 chance that the young man could be kept alive. The 29-year-old computer programmer is suffering from acute lymphocytic leukemia, a bone-marrow cancer. He has been given only a 30% chance of survival unless he receives a bone-marrow transplant within the next two years.

Episcopal Bishop J. Jon Bruno, head of the six-county Los Angeles diocese, has been diagnosed with leukemia and is undergoing aggressive treatment to fight the disease. The 65-year-old bishop said in an open letter that he had been suffering from what he thought was a bout of pneumonia since March. He underwent further tests after treatment failed to cure the "nagging problem. " Doctors at Good Samaritan Hospital discovered that Bruno had acute monocytic leukemia, a form of blood cancer.

In a potential breakthrough in cancer research, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered patients' T cells — a type of white blood cell — to attack cancer cells in advanced cases of a common type of leukemia. Two of the three patients who received doses of the designer T cells in a clinical trial have remained cancer-free for more than a year, the researchers said. Experts not connected with the trial said the feat was important because it suggested that T cells could be tweaked to kill a range of cancers, including ones of the blood, breast and colon.

UCI Medical Center's bone marrow transplant program failed to perform enough transplants in all but one of the last 11 years to meet state standards and withdrew from a state program for the poor after repeated criticism, records show. California health regulators told UCI in 2002 that its program was "persistently inadequate" and rebuffed the hospital's plan to correct deficiencies.

Bone marrow transplants are no more effective than conventional chemotherapy in increasing the survival rate of children suffering from acute myeloid leukemia, according to researchers at the Children's Hospital of Michigan. A multi-center team randomly gave standard chemotherapy to 117 children and bone marrow treatments to 115 others in the hopes of curing their leukemia, which is caused by cancerous white blood cells.

Dr. Robert A. Good, 81, who performed the world's first successful human bone marrow transplant, died Friday of natural causes at his home in St. Petersburg, Fla. A native of Crosby, Minn., Good decided to become a doctor at age 6 when his father died of cancer. The youth survived his own serious illness, a polio-like disease, during his student years at the University of Minnesota.

In an effort to save the lives of two 17-year-old high school seniors, Brea Community Hospital is sponsoring a drive to find bone marrow donors who might be able reduce the 1-in-20,000 odds of finding a suitable match. Both Anissa Ayala of Walnut and Brandon Oba of Brea found out last year they have chronic leukemia, a fatal cancer of the blood that is progressive and curable only by bone marrow transplants.

For 8-month-old Blayke LaRue, the blood that will be dripped into his veins this morning will be just another inconvenience, another tube coming out of him, another obstacle to hamper him from playing and crawling. But that blood, a mere two ounces, could save the Oxnard baby's life.

In a potential breakthrough in cancer research, scientists at the University of Pennsylvania have genetically engineered patients' T cells — a type of white blood cell — to attack cancer cells in advanced cases of a common type of leukemia. Two of the three patients who received doses of the designer T cells in a clinical trial have remained cancer-free for more than a year, the researchers said. Experts not connected with the trial said the feat was important because it suggested that T cells could be tweaked to kill a range of cancers, including ones of the blood, breast and colon.

To many of the nation's million people living with a diagnosis of HIV/AIDS, Timothy Brown is the Harry Potter of the disease: Like the young wizard who survived Lord Voldemort's wrath, he is the boy who lived. Today, almost 20 years after he became infected, Brown is, essentially, cured. Brown, now 45, is known in medical-journal circles as "The Berlin Patient," a moniker assigned him by a February 2009 case study published in the New England Journal of Medicine. In a "Brief Report," oncologist Gero Huetter and his colleagues at Berlin's University Hospital described the unique stem-cell transplant of an HIV-infected patient — Brown — who had acute myeloid leukemia, and the remarkable result: Twenty months after the procedure, the virus had not reappeared in Brown's body, even though he was no longer taking antiretroviral drugs.

Dr. Ernest McCulloch, who with biophysicist James E. Till was the first to isolate and identify a stem cell, opening the door immediately to bone marrow transplants and eventually to what researchers believe will be a host of treatments for a broad spectrum of diseases ranging from spinal cord injuries to Alzheimer's, died Jan. 20 in Toronto, just two weeks shy of the 50th anniversary of the publication of the pair's seminal discovery. He was 84. "It's impossible to overstate the enormity of Till's and McCulloch's discovery and longtime collaboration," Dr. Christopher Paige of the Ontario Cancer Institute, where the pair worked, said in a statement.

Clad in a yellow gown, blue foot covers, hair net, face mask and latex gloves, Paula Cannon pushed open the door to the animal room. "I hate this smell," she said, wrinkling her nose. The stink came from scores of little white mice scurrying about in cages. Some of the cages were marked with red biohazard signs, indicating mice that had been injected with HIV. Yet, in some of the animals — ones with a small genetic change — the virus never took hold. Like mouse, like man?

Researchers have for the first time performed a successful bone marrow transplant to cure sickle cell disease in adults, a feat that could expand the procedure to more of the 70,000 Americans with the disease -- and possibly some other diseases as well. About 200 children have been cured of sickle cell with transplants, but the procedure was considered too harsh for adults with severe sickle cell disease. Now a team from the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University is reporting today in the New England Journal of Medicine that it has developed a much-less-toxic transplant procedure and used it to cure nine of the first 10 patients studied.

When Mina and Sam Chamberlin fell in love, they knew they might have to overcome some cultural barriers to make their interracial marriage work. But they never imagined that their South Asian and white genetic backgrounds would in any way put their children in potential harm's way. Then in September, the couple's 4-year old daughter, Maya, was diagnosed with a rare blood disease known as HLH. Only a bone marrow transplant could save her life....

Medical researchers in Los Angeles County intend to begin testing bone-marrow transplantation as a treatment for some AIDS patients, in light of a case in which a man appeared to have been purged of the AIDS virus after physicians replaced his bone marrow.

Luke Gane had to be there, even at his own peril. For weeks the Huntington Beach Edison High football player had pestered his doctors about attending last year's Chargers' "Battle for the Bell" game against archrival Fountain Valley. Playing wasn't an option. Gane had been sidelined for the entire 2008 season by a rare blood disorder, and his doctors had ordered him to stay away from crowds because it put his weakened body at risk of infectious diseases. Finally, the junior lineman struck a deal with his physicians: He would wear a mask and stay at least 50 yards away from the crowd.

Dr. Ernest Beutler, a Scripps Research Institute physician and researcher who was one of the country's leading experts on diseases of the blood and iron metabolism, died Sunday of lymphoma at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla. He was 80.