Hospital finds hope in umbilical cords

MIAMI — When Jennifer Garcia scheduled the birth of her daughter at South Miami Hospital, nurses asked her an unusual question: "After your baby is born, are you willing to donate the umbilical cord to save someone's life?"

She said yes: "What's the point of throwing it in the trash if it can help other people?"

When Natalia Garcia, seven pounds six ounces, arrived at 3:56 p.m. on a recent Wednesday, the blood from the cord and placenta — about a quarter cup — was collected by those nurses, working in the hospital's new public Cord Blood Donation Center.

They flew it to a lab at Duke University in North Carolina, and the stem cells were spun off and stored at minus 320 degrees Fahrenheit. The cells became part of a rapidly growing national bank of cord blood stem cells waiting to treat patients with leukemia, lymphoma, multiple myeloma, aplastic anemia, sickle cell and other diseases.

Scientists are now discovering the power of cord blood stem cells, which are easier to collect and can be used more flexibly than bone marrow stem cells traditionally employed to fight blood diseases.

South Miami Hospital's new center — one of only five in the state — is part of an expanding network of centers for a new therapy that has grown up over the past five years, using flexible umbilical cord blood stem cells instead of harder-to-extract bone marrow stem cells to fight blood diseases.

"This can make a real difference in giving doctors a choice of treatment," says Kathy Welte, director of the national Cord Blood Center in Minneapolis.

The new collection center, which opened in January, is especially welcome because of South Florida's diverse population, since minorities are seriously under-represented in the stem cells stored so far, she said.

South Miami Hospital's center came about after stem cells from centers in New York and Germany in 2007 treated the leukemia of the son, then 9, of one of the hospital's cardiologists.

"Those cells saved his life, and they came from umbilical cords, something we'd just been throwing away," says Dr. Harry Aldrich, who asked that his son's name not be used.

The case of Aldrich's son demonstrates the power of cord blood stem cells. At 9, the boy had acute myelogenous leukemia, a cancer of the blood that starts in the bone marrow.