$100,000 Grant to Tissue Bank in Torrance Saves It From Closing

The Southern California Tissue Bank, a small Torrance-based agency that supplies much-needed skin to burn victims, received a $100,000 grant Thursday that allows it to stay open.

“We certainly got a reprieve from the gallows, so to speak,” said Dr. Allen McDaniels, the tissue bank’s medical director.

Three months ago, the nonprofit agency found itself more than $100,000 in debt, which officials blamed in part on cash-flow problems and a decline in donors.

The grant from the Los Angeles-based Ralph M. Parsons Foundation will allow the facility to pay its debts and ongoing expenses while it develops more funding sources and works with hospitals to find more donors.

The grant is by far the largest ever received by the tiny 13-year-old tissue bank, which has a full-time staff of three. In an era when many health care agencies are struggling financially, tissue bank officials say they are relieved and grateful.

“It gives us new life in terms of our viability,” McDaniels said, although he warned, “We’re not home free.”

The bank, a key source of tissue for area burn centers, has provided skin and organs for more than 1,000 burn and trauma patients. The skin is used as a kind of bandage for burn patients, warding off infection and aiding fluid retention; the patient’s own skin is used for permanent grafts.

When Parsons Foundation President Joseph Hurley read a Los Angeles Times article this summer about the agency’s plight, he asked his staff to look into the matter. The foundation decided a grant was in order.

“It would appear that the amount of money that’s being talked about is not the national debt,” Hurley said. “You could save what is a very important function with comparatively little money.”

The foundation has assets of $185 million and awarded $5.7 million last year to 97 grantees, officials said. It focuses on higher education, especially areas of science and technology, social and health services programs, and civic and cultural projects.

The foundation likes to fund projects “that are really worthwhile and that are in need of a shot in the arm,” Hurley said, “but are not so worn out or far down that even with our money, they’re in doubt.”

Skin from the tissue bank helps patients at Los Angeles County’s three burn centers: Torrance Memorial Medical Center, County-USC Medical Center and Sherman Oaks Hospital and Health Center.

Torrance Memorial “appreciates the immediate supply of skin that the tissue bank has provided to burn patients and is thankful that they will continue to remain within the community,” said Ray Rahn, the hospital’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, in a statement Thursday.

With its finances stabilized for now, the tissue bank plans to hire a staff person to work with local hospitals to expand its donor pool, step up its search for grant money and firm up its economic future, tissue bank officials said.

A remaining concern, they said, is a shortage of donors, which at times has forced the agency to import tissue from cadavers outside the state. (A chief source of tissue is through people filling out donor cards authorizing the use of their bodies for medical purposes after their deaths.)

If even five people or fewer had been seriously burned in the Oct. 8 explosion at Texaco’s Wilmington refinery, McDaniels said, “We could not meet the need locally.”