CHOC, St. Joseph Win Grant for National Center

Beating out scores of hospitals nationwide, Children’s Hospital of Orange County and St. Joseph Hospital won a $5.5-million contract Wednesday to establish a national medical center to practice a promising new alternative to bone marrow transplants.

The two hospitals will explore the lifesaving potential for umbilical cord blood transplants with the grant from the National Institutes of Health. They will become one of six national cord blood collection and research centers to be established, and one of up to eight cord blood transplant centers in the nation.

“It was very competitive, and we are ecstatic to be given this chance,” said Dr. Mitchell Cairo, director of CHOC’s blood and bone-marrow transplantation program. “This will create a window of opportunity for people in great need.”

Cord blood transplants, a new therapy for the treatment of cancer, gained national attention earlier this year when Michelle Carew, daughter of baseball Hall of Famer Rod Carew, underwent the procedure. Used to reinvigorate the immune system, the procedure involves transplanting cells from a newborn’s umbilical cord into a patient to stimulate the growth of normal blood cells.

Cord transplants offer key advantages over bone marrow transplants, doctors say. Bone marrow transplants can take months to set up. First, a donor must be found through the National Marrow Donor Program. Then the typing must be rechecked.

Cord blood, on the other hand, is already in storage. And, because some of the immune cells from the cord blood are less developed than those that come from adult bone marrow, there is lower risk of rejection.

Although unsuccessful in the case of Michelle Carew, who died of leukemia at CHOC in April, cord blood transplants have about a 50% success rate.

In Southern California, the procedure was first performed at CHOC on a 4-year-old leukemia patient in February 1995.

As many as 80 hospitals across the nation applied for the funds in August 1995, Cairo said.