DRUG DISCOVERY NEWS

Doctors are recording a wave of wins using cord blood to heal sick children. The clinical evidence suggests that more wins may come.

Caridad Martinez has a bone to pick with bone marrow. In 2008, during her pediatric bone marrow transplant fellowship, Martinez met newborns with severe immunodeficiencies. Those patients’ bone marrow manufactured dysfunctional blood and immune cells. The kids were dying. The standard remedy was to fetch marrow from a donor to hopefully replace the faulty cells with healthier ones.

However, finding a bone marrow match can be hard, especially for racial and ethnic minorities. “You don’t have the same representation of donors,” said Martinez, who is now a bone marrow transplantation researcher at Baylor College of Medicine and a physician at Texas Children’s Hospital. White patients have a 79 percent chance of finding an unrelated donor; Black and African American patients have just a 29 percent chance (1). At the time of Martinez’s fellowship, marrow transplants were a stalwart in the field, but she noticed an urgent need to challenge the status quo. She found that opportunity with a then-budding type of transplant that she felt might be more accessible: transplanting blood from umbilical cords.

Read the full story in the February Issue of Drug Discovery News