http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/cst-nws-stem07.html
August 7, 2001
The first stem-cell transplant to
treat Crohn's disease appears to be working, said a doctor at Northwestern
Memorial Hospital, where the procedure was performed 10 weeks ago.
The results were encouraging enough
that the hospital performed a second transplant on a 16-year-old boy Monday.
The first patient, 22-year-old Joy
Weiss, who lives near Bangor, Maine, had suffered from Crohn's disease
since she was a child. Her white blood cells were assaulting her digestive
system as if they were an invading army of infectious bacteria.
"My body rejects my stomach and there's
nothing I can do," Weiss told her hometown newspaper, the Bangor Daily
News, before the transplant.
Many with the autoimmune disorder
live relatively normal lives. For others, it can be fatal.
Weiss' disease, which affects more
than 50,000 Americans, had progressed to the point where she had to have
morphine pumped into her spine to control the pain. Another line carried
nutrients into her bloodstream because she was unable to digest food. She
had also endured chronic diarrhea, her weight was down to 80 pounds and
she faced a colostomy.
"We've been in and out of hospitals
so many times, it's a blur," said her mother, Barbara, who is a registered
nurse.
But after the stem cell transplant,
her Crohn's symptoms have gone and her digestive system appears to be recovering,
said Dr. Richard Burt, who performed the procedure.
"She's failed everything out there
that's available, and now two and a half months after the transplant, she's
had no diarrhea and no abdominal pain," said Burt, who is chief of the
hospital's division of Immune Therapy and Autoimmune Diseases.
"It's gone as good as we could have
wished for so far," he said.
Weiss' procedure involved the use
of her own body's blood stem cells, which are different from the more controversial
embryonic stem cells.
Embryonic stem cells can potentially
grow any type of cells, such as those that make up heart, lung and brain
tissue. Blood stem cells can be building blocks only for cells that circulate
through the blood, such as white blood cells that attack infections.
Weiss' own stem cells could be used
to grow new cells for her immune system--hopefully ones that would not
attack her own body.
But first her faulty immune system
had to be destroyed, using powerful chemotherapy drugs. Then stem cells
that had been previously removed from Weiss were injected back into her
bloodstream.
They "headed home" to the bone marrow
and immediately began producing new immune system cells, Burt said.
The most dangerous period was the
two weeks before Weiss' new immune system began to take hold, when she
had to be kept in sterile conditions to avoid exposure to an infection
she had no power to fight against. In rare cases that period can prove
fatal, but the worst Weiss suffered was a couple of days of fever.
Burt describes the process as a way
of resetting the immune system.
"A lot of these people weren't born
this way; they spend 20 to 40 years of their life without anything happening,"
he said. "So what we're doing is just letting it start back over as if
they were reborn."
It's too soon to say whether the
process is even a possible cure. But similar procedures have been used
successfully to treat another autoimmune disease, lupus.
Burt has also had promising results
treating multiple sclerosis with a similar process.
In the case of Crohn's disease, "We
would have to follow a patient for at least five years," Burt said.
Copyright 2000, Digital Chicago Inc.
BY ART GOLAB STAFF REPORTER