Kailee Wells

Newsline (Fall 2004)

Newslines

Blood Center Hosts Marrow Drive for Kailee
Puget Sound Blood Center, the local affiliate of the National Marrow Donor Program (NMDP), and Asian Adult Adoptees of Washington (AAAW) co-sponsored a marrow drive May 16 in Seattle’s International District to raise awareness about a 7-year-old Chinese girl. A week before the drive, the Blood Center hosted a press conference to promote it.

Because she is adopted, Kailee Wells does not have a marrow match from her birth family and must find an unrelated donor from the same ethnic background. The Albuquerque, N.M., girl was diagnosed in Jan. 2002 with aplastic anemia, a rare blood disease that develops as a result of the bone marrow’s failure to produce red blood cells. She is one of thousands of patients who need of a lifesaving marrow or blood stem cell transplant.

To find an exact marrow match, Kailee’s parents, Owen and Linda Wells, visited cities with large Asian communities to encourage participation in marrow drives and then enlisted local NMDP affiliates like the Blood Center to urge Asian Pacific Islanders to register with NMDP.

To Learn More

 
Local High School Shatters Record for Blood Donations
Competition runs deep at Auburn High School of Auburn, Washington. Add its passion for community service and it’s no surprise that on May 19 the school broke a single-day blood donation record with 461 total registered blood donors at a mobile drive conducted by Puget Sound Blood Center. This was the largest number of donations ever made in one day by an organization in the Blood Center’s 60 years.

Because the Blood Center separates each unit of blood collected into three life-saving components, the Auburn High School drive has the potential to save nearly 1,400 lives in the community.

High schools in the Western Washington region provide approximately 17 percent of the community blood supply and help the Blood Center maintain one of the nation’s most stable blood supplies.

Of the 461 donors registered at this drive, 205 of them donated for the first time. The high school has registered more than 300 donors at each of its two annual drives, which was made possible through the efforts of its Service Learning Program, taught by faculty member Heidi Bendt.

New Option for  New Parents at UW
The world’s youngest stem cell donor was at the University of Washington Medical Center — for a moment.

On June 15, the blood that remained in the placenta after a birth there was donated to the Cord Blood Program at the Northwest Tissue Services, a division of Puget Sound Blood Center. Umbilical cord blood donated to the Tissue Center is available to people worldwide through the National Marrow Donor Program and the Caitlin Raymond International Cord Blood Registry.

The Tissue Center processes and stores the stem cells for transplant.
In addition to treating leukemia, cord blood is used to help patients with anemias, Hodgkin’s lymphoma, immune deficiency disorders, bone marrow failure and other life-threatening diseases.

The Blood Center’s partnership with the University of Washington provides the opportunity for expectant parents to choose to donate cord blood after the birth of their baby. Previously, the cord blood was discarded, used in research or stored for use by the birth family, which paid a processing and storage fee.

There is no charge, however, to donate cord blood to the Tissue Center, where it becomes available to whoever needs a stem cell transplant – it’s the first cord blood bank in the Northwest and the only community bank in the state of Washington. The Cord Blood Program’s first partnership was with Swedish Medical Center, where collections began in 1998.

In addition, Kapi’olani, Tripler, Queen’s and Kaiser Permanente Medical Centers in Hawaii also participate in the Cord Blood Program.

The actual process of obtaining the cord blood is painless and doesn’t interfere with birth or mother and child bonding. There is no risk to the mother or baby and the collection requires no additional staff during the baby’s delivery.

Signing up to donate is simple. And as with any blood donation, there is a careful screening process. Cord blood donation screening requires a 15-minute phone interview prior to going into labor, and a blood draw from the expectant mother’s arm after she is admitted to the hospital. Well before the baby’s due date, families interested in donating cord blood should call the Cord Blood Program at 206-292-1896 or 1-800-DONATE-1, extension 1896, to obtain a copy of the consent form.

Cord Blood transplants are typically used to treat blood diseases, such as leukemia and aplastic anemia. “Cord blood” is the blood remaining in the umbilical cord and placenta after the birth of a baby. About 2 cups of cord blood – rich in stem cells, which are the “parent” cells of all blood cells – can be collected from each placenta. These cells are found in the bone marrow of adults and in the circulatory system of infants and can be used in place of bone marrow stem cells when a matching bone marrow donor cannot be found.

Once transplanted, they migrate to the bone marrow, where they begin creating healthy blood cells. This enables the recipient to reconstitute the immune system. Because of the limited number of cells that can be collected, cord blood is primarily used for children.

However, cord blood research at the Blood Center, University of Washington, and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center is offering hope for adults with life-threatening diseases of the blood system. Many researchers are developing ways to expand the number of stem cells in a unit of cord blood, in order to treat adults.

Tissue Center Answers Plea for Help
In response to an urgent need, the Northwest Tissue Services sent 40 skin grafts to Paraguay on August 9. A week earlier, a supermarket fire in the town of Asuncion left 423 people dead, 139 missing and 451 injured. The government of Paraguay asked for assistance from the U.S. State Department, which in turn, contacted the American Association of Tissue Banks (AATB). As an AATB member, Northwest Tissue Services acted promptly with the initial shipment and an offer to help further. Carlos Ortiz, the Paraguayan consulate general in Miami, thanked contributing AATB members: “This will help people who are not only physically but emotionally in pain.”


LEFT: The Tissue Center will be providing the Grafton® Matrix allografts.
RIGHT: The Tissue Center will soon provide MTF/Synthes spacers, including the T-PLIF

New Ad Campaign Attracts Notice
Puget Sound Blood Center is a leader in research, medicine, and blood and tissue services, and that message is being spread in a variety of ways during its 60th anniversary year.

The current advertising campaign plays on those themes in an effort to raise public awareness of the level of expertise and services that can be found at the Blood Center. Billboards, transit signs, ads in newspapers, radio, TV and selected print pieces address the Blood Center’s many services beyond maintaining a safe and stable blood supply. For example, the campaign notes the Blood Center’s critical role in advancing transfusion and transplantation medicine through research and education.

The colorful ads cover the full scope of the Blood Center’s work and in many instances, depicts research staff and patients. Watch for them!

 
  Northwest Tissue Services Director Margery Moogk
Tissue Center Partnerships: Patients, Hospitals Benefit
In keeping with its longstanding commitment to provide the best care, service and products, the Northwest Tissue Services recently entered into agreements that will make proprietary tissue products more accessible to patients in the hospitals it serves.

The new partnerships are with the nonprofit Musculoskeletal Transplant Foundation (MTF) and with Osteotech, Inc., a facility that is accredited by the American Association of Tissue Banks.

“There are remarkable advances being made in the kind of tissue products that have been developed in recent years,” says Northwest Tissue Services Director Margery Moogk. “They promote faster healing, reduce surgery time and blood use and shorten hospital stays. We want to be able to offer all of those improvements and add to that our reassurance that these products come from donors that are suitable, that the tissues have been recovered according to our standards, and that they are processed by partners in whom we have a high degree of confidence.”

MTF will process Tissue Center-provided bone into precisely tooled bone grafts that are easily implanted during spinal surgery using matching instrumentation. Developed by MTF and Synthes Spine, L.P, the MTF/Synthes allograft enables surgeons to more efficiently perform delicate spinal fusion operations and leads to safer and more comfortable recoveries for patients. MTF will also process demineralized bone into paste and putty.

Osteotech, under its Grafton brand name of demineralized bone matrices (DBM), will process Tissue Center-provided bone into osteoinductive and conductive graft materials of various types, including DBM gel, paste, putty and matrix.

These demineralized bone allografts are being used in a variety of orthopedic, neuro and reconstructive surgeries, as well as in many dental procedures where new bone growth is important.

“In both relationships,” said Moogk, “some issues were non-negotiable for us. We are committed to providing allografts from bone we recover in our community, so we can be confident that donor suitability, recovery, processing, serological screening and microbiological testing comply with our rigorous policies and procedures. We sought partners who respect that objective.”