LaRue Baby Gaining, Donors Found for Brother

After months of nothing but worry, the LaRue family finally has some good news.

Not only is the Oxnard family’s baby, Blayke, recovering well after a risky new transplant procedure, but two donors have been located for their 3-year-old, Garrett, doctors said.

In the tenuous world of bone-marrow transplants--where chances of finding matches are only about 1 in 20,000--the LaRues may have hit the jackpot.

The touching plight of Scott and Theresa LaRue’s young family prompted bone-marrow donor drives from Ventura County to the San Fernando Valley, where the boys’ grandfather, Ron LaRue, is an officer with the Los Angeles Police Department.

The drives added about 6,400 names to the national donor bank; donors for both boys were ultimately found outside California.

Using a donor from a New York blood bank, doctors at UCLA Medical Center last month completely replaced Blayke’s compromised immune system with blood from an umbilical cord and then sat back to see if his 10-month-old body would accept the new blood cells.

After a few weeks of high fevers and infections, Blayke is doing well and may even be considered for release as early as next week, doctors say.

“We’re not out of the woods yet,” said Dr. Stephen Feig, chief of pediatric hematology and oncology at UCLA Medical Center. “But things are looking up and we’re very pleased.”

The baby’s white blood cell count, which had hit zero after chemotherapy treatments in preparation for the procedure, has climbed to 1,800.

Although doctors said that count is much higher in healthy people, between 4,000 and 10,000, it is a good sign for Blayke.

“For a kid that has been through what he has been through, that’s great,” Feig said. “He is coming back nicely.”

And it shows.

“He is laughing, smiling and eating,” his mother said. “It’s just miraculous. To think that they are thinking of discharging him is just unbelievable.”

Feig said Blayke will be tested in the next few days to see if his new bone marrow is from the donor blood or if his own compromised immune system managed to survive the chemotherapy and rejuvenate itself. But the likelihood is that the immune system is a new one, free from the disease, he said.

“I presume because of the rapidity with which it came back that it is the donor’s,” Feig said.

To top off the optimistic outlook for Blayke, doctors have found not one, but two good matches for Garrett. The first donor is from Finland; the second is blood from another umbilical cord.

Doctors rate donor matches on a scale of 1 to 6. The Finnish donor is a perfect match for Garrett, a 6 out of 6, while the umbilical-cord blood is just a good match, 4 out of 6. The UCLA doctors aren’t sure yet, but they may consider using the less-than-perfect match, in part because of how well it has worked with Blayke.

The science is so new that Blayke’s procedure marked the first time that UCLA used the experimental method of transplanting stem cells, the blood cells that spur growth of immune systems. It has been done less than 200 times worldwide.

Medical science is still a little hazy on the whys and hows, but it appears that umbilical-cord blood transplant recipients may be less subject to graft-versus-host disease, where the body wages war with the new organ or cells it has received.

“Seeing Blayke, it sure looks as though that problem [graft-versus-host disease] is less with the umbilical-cord transplants,” Feig said. “I’m very high on it. I’m very enthusiastic.”

Blayke has had some graft-versus-host disease, but only on his skin, he said.

The hitch of the umbilical-cord transplants is that the amount of blood gleaned from the cord and placenta is small and only adequate for very young children. Doctors said Garrett might already be too big for the new procedure.

Both boys suffer from X-linked lymphoproliferative disease (XLP), which kills most of its victims before they reach the age of 10. It is so rare that only about 300 cases of it have been reported since it was discovered in the late 1960s.

But the disease has stuck the LaRue family particularly hard; last summer, Theresa and Scott lost another son, Layne, to it before they discovered the disease’s existence.