this week in sickle cell news June 8th to the 14th

By Sean Marshall

An interesting article was published this week on the issues researchers face when attempting to publish ground breaking findings or begin new and bold studies when policies get in the way. What is interesting about the article was the ending section about a scientist by the name of Donald B. Kohn. IT explained that after spending seven years researching stem cells specifically for the treatment of sickle cell disease he still has five to 10 years of work to go before it can even be approved as a treatment method by the Food and Drug Administration.

The long wait is due to policies put in place, safety standards and other such protocols. They are in no sense bad or time wasting many of these barriers have been put in place for a reason but this article did shed light on why medical processes take so long despite the amount of money and effort put into cures.

It was also mentioned what the process of his potential cure was. “In this method, bone marrow is taken out of the patient, the mutated gene is replaced and the marrow is transplanted back into the patient.” With that being explained it does become clear why there have been so many safety tests and other legalities involved.

The original article can be found here: http://dailybruin.com/2015/06/07/ucla-researchers-seek-to-influence-policy-change-across-diverse-fields/

Relatively short but sweet story was published on the 11th about a little girl's sister curing her sickle cell disease via bone marrow in New York city. A quote from the article sums up the whole endeavor “sisters Elizabeth and Esther Adegboyega are nearly inseparable but a recent act has made them even closer.” Essentially that's all there is to say Elizabeth had sickle cell disease and her sister Ester gave her a bone marrow transplant and as of right now the doctors at Hackensack Medical Center have cleared Elizabeth of her sickle cell disease. This was covered by ABC news and a short video summing up the events as well as the original article can be found here: http://7online.com/health/sickle-cell-anemia-patient-cured-thanks-to-her-little-sister/778702/

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