UCSF, GE Healthcare Team Up On Pioneering Cord Blood Project

The goal of the $840,000, three-year project is to make better use of a rich source of routinely discarded stem cells: umbilical cord blood from the birth of a baby.

Every year, more than 14,000 U.S. patients are diagnosed with diseases that have the potential to be treated with a transplant of blood-forming stem cells. These patients need a way to replace their diseased blood cells with healthy ones that can grow and flourish.

For many, the best option would be a transplant of stem cells from the bone marrow or blood of a sibling or family member. But for some 70 percent of patients, no matching family donor is available. Finding unrelated donors whose tissue types match isn’t easy.

As a result, many patients die or become too ill for a transplant. At UCSF, specialists perform about 190 transplants in adults each year and the number is rising, according to Andrew Leavitt, MD, medical director of the UCSF Adult Blood and Marrow Transplant Laboratory. “We have patients who can’t get optimal therapy because we can’t find a donor to provide a transplant,” Leavitt said.
“For these patients, it’s a matter of life and death.”

Another potential source of hematopoietic (blood-forming) stem cells is the blood that remains in the umbilical cord and placenta after the birth of a baby. While it’s usually discarded, many countries are now establishing cord blood banks, enabling parents to donate their baby’s cord blood for future use by others.
 
The UCSF/GE Healthcare collaboration will focus on cord blood, which has some key advantages for transplants: It’s loaded with the stem and progenitor cells that make all the other cells in the blood system – including white cells, red cells and platelets. It can be collected easily without causing pain or risk to the donor. And cord blood doesn’t need to match the tissue type of the patient receiving it as closely as bone marrow does.
 
In recent years, a growing number of patients have received cord-blood transplants. They work wonderfully for many sick children, Leavitt said, but for most adult patients, cord blood simply doesn’t provide a large enough number of stem cells.
 
Now, using a Discovery Grant awarded by the University of California’s Office of the President, along with matching funds from GE Healthcare, a group of scientists led by Leavitt has begun a three-year project. They’ll be hunting for chemical compounds that can be added to the stem cells and progenitor cells in cord blood to increase their population. If the process works, the number of cells transplanted should be large enough to replace the patient’s diseased blood system with a healthy one.
 
During the first year, UCSF scientists led by Michelle Arkin, PhD, associate director of the Small Molecule Discovery Center, will use ultra-fast, robotic technology to screen 120,000 chemicals searching for those that may trigger the expansion of stem cells. A high-tech automated microscope provided by GE, the IN Cell 2000, will help Arkin and her team narrow those down to a few that look like potential candidates.
 
“One hundred-twenty thousand compounds is a huge number,” said Stephen Minger, PhD, global head of research & development for Cell Technologies at GE Healthcare. “Slowly but surely we’ll narrow the list.’’  GE Healthcare is funding the project as part of its mission to develop technologies that support the emerging era of regenerative medicine.
 
During the project’s second year, the scientists hope to test the best candidates to see what happens when they’re mixed with blood cells in the lab or in animals. Later, they’ll use GE’s Cell Factory™ to produce large quantities of cells for further testing. By the end of the project, the team hopes to have promising compounds moving toward clinical trials.
 
“If this succeeds it will be incredibly important,” Minger said. “The clinical potential of being able to expand hematopoietic stem cells in cord blood is huge. If this works, we’ll have discovered something that the world desperately needs.”