By Suzanne Sprague
DALLAS – [Ambient sound of mother talking to toddler]
Suzanne Sprague, KERA 90.1 Reporter: Piper Huckleberry almost lost the chance to watch her daughter Abby turn two years old last week. The McKinney kindergarten teacher was diagnosed with leukemia 10 months ago and needed a bone marrow transplant to replace blood cells destroyed by the leukemia and chemotherapy.
Piper Huckleberry, Cord Blood Transplant Recipient: We didn't have a match. We tried to match with my siblings, other members of my family, friends. We did blood drives. My husband's company did a blood drive and no one matched.
Sprague: That's when Huckleberry met Dr. Craig Rosenfeld at Medical City Dallas Hospital. He told her of a relatively new procedure called a cord blood transplant that uses blood from a newborn baby's umbilical cord.
Craig Rosenfeld, M.D., Oncologist and Hematologist: With cord blood, we're finding out that you do not have to be an exact match. You can be a close match, but not an exact match, and that greatly extends the number of potential donors.
Sprague: Dr. Rosenfeld found a close enough match at a cord blood bank on the west coast. Cord blood is rich in stem cells, which grow into new, healthy bone marrow and blood. And so he transplanted that blood into the 29-year-old Huckleberry.
Huckleberry: The actual transplant itself was pretty uneventful and anticlimactic. They just sort of hooked it up to my IV and they just let it drip in. It took about 20 or 30 minutes for the whole thing to drip in, and that was it.
Sprague: Then the waiting began. Huckleberry spent 44 days in isolation while doctors closely monitored her blood count. She couldn't leave her hospital room, get her own glass of water, or see her infant daughter.
[Ambient sound of baby and mom talking]
Sprague: But now, seven months after her transplant, Piper Huckleberry is free of leukemia. She's at home with her husband and daughter, and she'll start teaching again in the fall, thanks to about half a cup of blood that is almost always thrown away in the delivery room.
Dr. Rosenfeld: Normally now, what we do when, after a woman delivers, the placenta and the cord blood is usually discarded. Now that there's recognition that these cells can be used for transplantation, we would like to work to saving these cells to save other peoples' lives.
Sprague: Dr. Rosenfeld is part of a team at Medical City that is leading the curve state-wide on cord blood transplants. He has worked since 1996 to establish a public cord blood bank in Texas. Right now, there are fewer than 10 in the country. This legislative session, he found a sympathetic ear in Representative Kenn George.
Kenn George, Texas Representative, District 108: I really think we have a chance to do something tremendous for our citizens, as well as to be one of the leading centers for research and development in this new breakthrough science.
Sprague: The Dallas Republican says parents would have to give their permission for doctors to harvest cord blood after a baby was delivered safely. The blood would then be frozen and stored indefinitely at the public bank. More than 1,500 cord blood transplants have been performed in the U.S. over the last decade. Besides saving lives, they also circumvent the ethical debate over obtaining stem cells from aborted fetal tissue. Representative Kenn George says he faced no opposition to establishing a cord blood bank in Texas because the blood comes from healthy, full-term babies. George: I referred to this as the ethical alternative for all parties. Nobody can find a philosophical, religious, ethical objection to collecting what is otherwise being thrown away everyday in the trash.
Sprague: But Fred Grinnell, who directs the Program in Ethics in Science and Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical School, says cord blood transplants do raise some questions.
Fred Grinnell, Professor of Cell Biology, University of Texas Southwestern Medical School: Right now, when there's a delivery, the attention is on the kid and on the mom, and that's where the action is. But if there's now a third person or a third partner in this interaction, the cord blood, then that detracts from the attention paid to the mom or the kid. So all of a sudden there are competing interests where there weren't before, and where there are competing interests, that introduces an ethical problem.
Sprague: So does the testing of cord blood for possible defects or diseases.
Grinnell: Well, if you take cord blood and you do genetic testing on it, then all of a sudden, you're potentially finding out information that the medical genetic community says you ought not to be finding out. So what happens to that information?
Sprague: Grinnell asks if medical personnel at the bank should tell parents their newborn baby has a genetic defect for which there is no treatment? In Texas, the process would be anonymous. So, theoretically, that couldn't happen. But the state's efforts to establish a public cord blood bank will have to compete with parents who are paying upwards of $1,000 to store their babies' cord blood privately for their own potential use. About 150,000 parents in the United States have chosen to do this. But Piper Huckleberry hopes parents will choose the public option.
Huckleberry: Somewhere in California there's a lady that not only gave life for her new baby, but she also gave life to me, because she gave a part of something that would have gone to the garbage. I would give my next baby's cord. Definitely. Because I would know that it could save somebody's life.
Sprague: For cord blood transplants to work, it helps for the donor and recipient to be the same ethnicity. Since most of the public cord blood banks in the country aren't located near Hispanic communities, supporters in Texas believe one here could tap into an underserved population. Mary Beth Fisk is the Director of Tissue Services at the South Texas Blood and Tissue Center in San Antonio.
Mary Beth Fisk, Director of Tissue Services, South Texas Blood and Tissue Center: We know that it costs us anywhere from $700-$1000 per cord blood to process and store. It's quite an expensive process. So, we want to make sure that the units we're storing would be units that are useable, number one; and that would be the ones that are in our greatest need right now.
Sprague: The public cord blood bill has passed both the Texas Senate and the House. It awaits the governor's signature. Several million dollars have been appropriated for the facility, although the site has not yet been determined. But supporters expect they will also have to raise a significant amount of private money to get the blood bank started. They hope it can open its doors with 5,000-6,000 banked units within two years. For KERA 90.1, I'm Suzanne Sprague.