Advances using adult stem cells promise to revolutionize the treatment of numerous diseases. In this first post of a two-part series, I focus on the treatment of a patient with a devastating autoimmune disorder.
Molly Foley, a marketing consultant in Rock Island, Illinois, was just 33 when she first started noticing pain in her hands. Because she spent hours at a keyboard each day, she chalked up the problem to carpal tunnel syndrome, a repetitive strain injury. Her doctor agreed, but when treatment didn’t relieve the pain, he referred her to a rheumatologist for tests.
The diagnosis was shocking. She had scleroderma, an autoimmune disorder that causes the skin and internal connective tissues to thicken and tighten. Like other autoimmune diseases, scleroderma happens when, for unknown reasons, the body’s immune system turns on and begins attacking itself.
Within about 10 months of Foley’s first symptoms, she felt like she had aged 40 years. “I was unable to pick up anything off the floor or put on my own shoes and socks,” she says. “My hands and fingers lost strength so I couldn’t grip or hold on to things very well. And I couldn’t even lift my arms up over my head.” She eventually had to stop working—and playing. She could no longer play a round of golf with her husband or walk her 80-pound Goldendoodle dog, Smitty.
Her disease was so aggressive she was given just a 50 percent chance of living beyond five years. “Your world just stops when you hear words like that,” she says. “I was in disbelief.”
Foley’s search for treatments eventually led her to an adult stem cell study at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago, where patients with scleroderma and other autoimmune diseases are getting chemotherapy to wipe out their faulty immune system and then reboot it with a transplant of their body’s own blood stem cells. Called a bone marrow transplant, this procedure is standard treatment for leukemia and certain other cancers but still considered experimental for autoimmune disorders.
First doctors administer drugs to coax the cells from the bone marrow into the bloodstream, where they can be extracted easily. Then they separate the cells from the blood and store them until they can be returned to a patient after chemo. “When you get your stem cells back, it’s a simple transfusion,” Foley says. “But I felt like I was being reborn.”
Richard Burt, M.D., chief of immunotherapy for autoimmune diseases at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine in Chicago, likens the immune system to the body’s police force, which normally protects us from illness. “But in people with autoimmune diseases, the police attacks the body itself,” he says. “With this treatment, we go in and remove the entire force and replace it with a new group of officers who know what they’re supposed to do.” Because the immune system is literally erased, patients have to get all their childhood vaccines over again.
Patients spend as many as two months in the hospital, endure punishing drug regimens and risk potentially deadly infections between the time their immune system is destroyed and a new one develops. But for Foley, it was a small price to be back on the green and regularly walking Smitty to the park.
“I can do a 15-minute mile. That’s pretty astounding for a scleroderma patient,” she says. The only vestige of her disease is a bit of scar tissue around her knuckles.
In a phase 2 study published in August, all of the patients who received the treatment improved, compared to none of those in a control group who got the standard chemotherapy treatment. Further follow-up and additional studies will help determine if adult stem cells represent a permanent “cure.”
“A year ago I was wondering if it was going to be my last year,” says Foley. “I’m embracing this one as if I was never diagnosed with scleroderma.”
In my next blog post, I’ll profile a patient with sickle cell anemia who benefited from adult stem cells donated by her sister.
CONNECT THE DOTS
For more information on scleroderma, contact the Scleroderma Foundation or go to Medline Plus. Check out our blog post on turning adult wisdom teeth into stem cells, and another one on using stem cells to reattach teeth that have been knocked out.
Photo Credit: Jesse Inskeep of Inskeep Photography
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