A Healthy ‘Bone Marrow Baby’ Is Born to Ayalas

A baby girl, conceived in the hope that she can serve as a bone marrow donor for her teen-age sister, was born this week at Queen of the Valley Hospital in West Covina.

Marissa Eve Ayala was delivered Tuesday evening by Cesarean section to Walnut residents Abe and Mary Ayala, whose 18-year-old daughter Anissa suffers from a type of leukemia that can be cured only with a marrow transplant, according to Anissa’s doctors.

The baby is healthy and weighed slightly more than 6 pounds at birth, a doctor said.

In February, Anissa’s doctors at the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte disclosed that tissue tests indicated the unborn baby’s marrow cells were nearly identical to Anissa’s and may be able to save her life. There is a one-in-four chance that siblings with the same parents will have closely compatible bone marrow cells.

Marrow transplants from compatible donors have a 70% chance of thwarting chronic myelogenous leukemia, the disease afflicting Anissa, a senior at Walnut High School.

The Ayalas could not be reached Thursday, but doctors confirmed the birth. A press conference to announce the birth is scheduled for this morning.

“It looked like a perfectly normal, healthy little baby,” said Anissa’s doctor, City of Hope pediatric oncologist Patricia Konrad, who visited the family Tuesday night.

Konrad will perform the bone marrow transplant with a team of City of Hope doctors.

“They looked very excited, all of them,” Konrad said Thursday of the Ayalas. “This was totally unexpected . . . the baby wasn’t due for another week or so.”

Doctors say bone marrow can be obtained at little risk from an infant who is at least 6 months old. Marissa’s health will be closely monitored to determine the optimum time for a transplant, which will depend largely on the baby’s weight, Konrad said.

“If we had the choice of waiting longer, we would,” Konrad said, “but I don’t know if we do.”

But Konrad said Anissa’s health has shown no recent signs of deteriorating.

In preparation for the marrow transplant, Konrad collected blood from the baby’s umbilical cord and then froze it. The umbilical cord has a high concentration of so-called stem cells that help regenerate marrow.

The transplant, done under general anesthesia, is carried out by inserting a needle into the marrow cavity of the donor’s hipbone. Marrow is extracted, prepared, and then injected into a vein of the recipient. The cells travel through the bloodstream and into the bone marrow, where they grow.

The Ayalas decided to have a baby after failing to locate a suitable donor through a search by the National Marrow Donor Program and testing of Anissa’s family members. There is only a one-in-20,000 chance that unrelated people will have the same bone marrow type.

Their decision, and the announcement that the baby was a near-perfect match, drew some criticism from medical experts who cautioned that the unusual case may give false hope to desperate parents of young leukemia patients. Other experts said conceiving a baby solely for the purpose of donating bone marrow to a sibling raises troubling ethical questions.

Mary Ayala, 43, and her husband Abe, 45, said before they knew whether the new child’s marrow would match that, although they decided to have the baby to help their older daughter, they would welcome and love her either way.

In February, appearing before a packed conference room at Covina-based Life Savers Foundation of America, Anissa said tearfully:, “A lot of people think, ‘How can you do this? How can you be having this baby for your daughter?’ But she’s my baby sister and we’re going to love her for who she is, not for what she can give me.”