TWO West Vancouver residents are among 25 people planning to climb Mount Kilimanjaro this week in a show of support for Canada's first National Public Cord Blood Bank, set to go live next month.
Dr. Tanya Petraszko and Derek Amery are participating in the Canadian Blood Services Mount Kilimanjaro #Climb4Cord, a fundraiser for the project.
Canada is the only G8 country that doesn't have a national public cord blood program and Canadian Blood Services is working to change that. In March 2011, provincial and territorial ministries of health (except Quebec) announced a combined investment of $48 million over the next eight years - including $12.5 million in fundraising undertaken by the Canadian Blood Services' Campaign For All Canadians - to build the National Public Cord Blood Bank.
The bank is intended to improve access to stem cell transplants for patients in need by dramatically increasing the likelihood of finding a match.
According to Canadian Blood Services, the bank will collect, process, test and store donated cord blood units and they'll be available to patients both nationally and internationally who are in need of a stem cell transplant. Cord blood stem cell transplants can be used to treat more than 50 blood related diseases and disorders.
Canadian Blood Services is developing and will manage the cord blood bank and its Campaign For All Canadians has been a success, seeing those involved raise approximately $6 million. To help reach their target, #Climb4Cord is hoping to raise an additional $500,000.
The bank is set to go live in September, initially with a manufacturing site and two collection hospitals in Ottawa. A Toronto hospital will come on board by the end of the year, followed by an Edmonton manufacturing site and collection hospital in 2014. A Lower Mainland hospital will follow later next year, the exact location is still under negotiation.
"Hopefully in the next 18 months the whole thing will be operational. We'll have our $12.5 million," says Petraszko, a 46-yearold mother of three. Petraszko is the medical director of Canadian Blood Services' National Public Cord Blood Bank and serves as a medical consultant with Canadian Blood Services, B.C. and Yukon Blood Centre.
A hematologist, she has been working with Canadian Blood Services since 1999. In 2011, when they received the go-ahead from the governments to create the cord blood bank, she was offered the position as one of two medical directors.
"When CBS took on this project I was very excited to be involved because of my previous experience and interest in stem cells (and) my expertise in transfusion medicine, it was sort of a marriage between the two, which worked really well," she says.
According to Petraszko, a bone marrow transplant (also known as a stem cell transplant) is a standard life-saving treatment for people with diseases of the bone marrow, like leukemia, or diseases of the immune system, or other cancers where the treatment involves the destruction of bone marrow either on purpose or as an unavoidable side effect "Bone marrow transplants have been offered for years because what they do is allow you to repopulate your bone marrow with someone else's bone marrow cells and those cells are the stem cells. They're cells that are capable of regrowing into red cells, white cells and platelets and that's what you need to repopulate your bone marrow and also parts of the immune system," she says.
The best possible bone marrow match is a sibling, someone who has the same genetic type. However only 30 per cent of people have a sibling match. "If (they) don't then we have to look for an unrelated match," says Petraszko.
OneMatch is Canadian Blood Services' stem cell and marrow registry program and it links internationally with others to ensure the best possible match is made.
If someone is a match, there are two ways to donate stem cells. "Either you go to the operating room and they put you under a general anesthetic and they stick a needle in the back of your hip and they suck out a litre of bone marrow stem cells," says Petraszko.
A newer way to do it in the last 20 years is a process called peripheral stem cell collection. The donor is given medication to stimulate the growth of those cells, which spill out of the bone marrow and start circulating in the peripheral blood. They're then withdrawn from a vein in the donor's arm through a special machine.
An additional means of getting stem cells is from cord blood and the placenta. "Because the placenta is normally discarded after the baby is born, after the cord is cut, you can put a needle in the umbilical card and you can suck out the stem cells from there and then you put them in the freezer," says Petraszko.
A challenge with the existing registry is that when a patient needs a bone marrow donor, that donor first needs to be located and asked whether they're still healthy enough to donate and whether they're still interested in doing so. If eligible, they have to undergo the collection procedure and then the cells need to be delivered to the patient's hospital.
"There's often a delay in getting those stem cells so the beauty of (the new public cord bank) is if I have a match for cord blood, it's in a freezer and I can have it in a week," says Petraszko.
The other advantage of cord stem cells is that they're very immature and have different features compared to the stem cells that are collected from an adult donor. This makes it easier to match a recipient and a donor pair. "It opens up a lot more donor-recipient pairs and there's a higher likelihood that you can find a match in a cord unit than with an adult donor," says Petraszko.
When the new National Public Cord Blood Bank is up and running, mothers 18 and older, having had a healthy term, single pregnancy, will be invited to donate their placenta and cord to participating collection hospitals.
Canadian Blood Services intends to have pamphlets, including permission-to-collect forms, in every applicable general practitioner's, obstetrician's, midwife and doula's office to raise awareness of the bank. Mothers will be able to register in advance or after their baby is delivered.
"A lot of people are interested in it. It's just another opportunity to save a life," says Petraszko.
With the bank, Canadian Blood Services is particularly interested in ethnically diverse families because most donors worldwide on international registries are Caucasian. The likelihood of finding a match is 80 per cent for Caucasians and 15 per cent for African-Americans.
"We are really trying to target non-ethnically dominant individuals. There's some cultural perceptions and I think as a rule, Caucasians in general are very receptive to this but a lot of other ethnic groups don't understand it or they have different cultural beliefs and there's less awareness, or less excitement or willingness in these groups. This is why we need to do more education to explain to families of other ethnic groups that if you or someone you love develops leukemia, we can't find a match for you because no one of your genetic type is donating," says Petraszko.
To help raise the initial funding to get the bank up and running, Petraszko decided to participate in #Climb4Cord. She is one of three climbers from B.C., along with Vancouver resident Katherine Serrano, a Canadian Blood Services research scientist, and North Shore resident Derek Amery, head of Canadian Fixed Income, HSBC Global Asset Management Ltd.
Amery, who's been involved with Canadian Blood Services professionally for the last 10 years, heard about the Campaign For All Canadians and viewed #Climb4Cord as the perfect means of doing his part to help the cause and the community as a whole.
"Having had the opportunity to work with the CBS team and just to see their hard work, their dedication and the passion that they have for making the cord blood bank a reality and wanting to try to lend my support to that, that's really how it came about," says Amery, 45, a married father of two.
Amery and Petraszko have already left for Tanzania, Africa and the climb starts Tuesday, lasting nine days - seven days up and two days down.
For more information on: #Climb4Cord and to make a donation, visit cbs.kintera.org/climb4cord; the Campaign For All Canadians, visit campaignforcanadians.ca; and One Match, visit onematch.ca.
