Cairo to Leave CHOC for Research Post

Dr. Mitchell Cairo, a nationally renowned pediatric cancer researcher whose practices recently came under scrutiny, will leave Children’s Hospital of Orange County for Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., officials announced Friday.

Cairo, who has been with CHOC since 1981, will direct a 40-person research team, starting up a state-of-the art pediatric cancer research laboratory at the university’s Lombardi Cancer Center.

The laboratory, which has been at CHOC for the last five years, will be funded with a $2.8-million grant over three years by the Irvine-based Pediatric Cancer Research Foundation.

While at CHOC, Cairo gained national attention for his research into new techniques to battle cancer in the very young. In 1995, he was the first in Southern California to perform an experimental transplant of umbilical cord blood to treat leukemia.

He used that technique when he treated Michelle Carew, daughter of baseball Hall of Famer Rod Carew, in her much-publicized but unsuccessful battle against leukemia last year.

But Cairo’s reputation was tarnished earlier this year by a federal audit’s findings that in eight cases, CHOC’s research team failed to follow procedure in obtaining consent from patients or their families for experimental treatments. Cairo later characterized them as “minor consent issues” that were not serious enough to be considered research misconduct.

Nonetheless, the audit resulted in Cairo’s suspension for six months as the hospital’s head investigator for Children’s Cancer Group, a national research collaborative.

A few months earlier, CHOC stripped Cairo of several key posts and succeeded in pressuring him to step down as chairman of a medical group he led for years. An internal peer review was begun. A hospital spokesman said Friday that any information about the review’s status is confidential.

With Cairo’s departure, CHOC will lose a $5.5-million grant awarded last year by the National Institutes of Health to develop alternative treatments to bone marrow transplants for leukemia.

Cairo said medical equipment, along with the remaining funds, will have to be returned to the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute within NIH, which will decide how to reallocate the grant. Cairo said he is proposing to the NIH that the grant be transferred to his laboratory in Georgetown.

In his new post, Cairo will become a professor of pediatrics, medicine and pathology, director of pediatric stem cell transplantation, cellular and gene therapy, and director of all children’s cancer and treatment programs at the Lombardi Center.

“This is clearly an opportunity to extend my professional career, to relocate to a more academic center,” Cairo said. “It’s a unique opportunity to interact with the international community, with the NIH and everything else in that the [Washington, D.C.] area offers.”

He said he regrets leaving patients and the “superb” staff at CHOC, “but with this new opportunity maybe I can contribute more.”

Cancer patients at the hospital in Orange will continue to benefit from Cairo’s research through the establishment of a consortium of the Lombardi Center, CHOC and possibly two Los Angeles-area hospitals, said foundation president Don Roberson. Advances and information derived from the research in Georgetown will be shared with the other hospitals, he said.