Two area blood and marrow transplant programs form single program

Monday, September 30, 2002

JACKSONVILLE, Fla., Sept. 30, 2002 — Two of Jacksonville's blood and marrow transplant programs have joined to form a single program to treat children and adults with certain cancers and blood disorders. The Blood and Marrow Transplantation Program of Mayo Clinic, Nemours Children's Clinic and Wolfson Children's Hospital will serve patients in Northeast Florida and beyond.

Stem cells are capable of maturing into all the different types of cells in the body. Blood-forming stem cells can be collected from bone marrow, peripheral blood and umbilical cord blood and used in transplants to treat different types of leukemia and lymphoma, other cancers and blood diseases and certain metabolic, immune system and inherited disorders.

The new program will share a single cryopreservation laboratory (where stem cells are frozen and processed) located at Mayo's St. Luke's Hospital. St. Luke's will maintain its adult blood and marrow transplant unit, and Wolfson Children's Hospital will maintain its pediatric blood and marrow transplant unit. The joint program will share research, clinical protocols and physician and staff expertise.

Lawrence Solberg, M.D., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic hematologist, will serve a two-year term as the new program's first director. Michael Joyce, M.D., Ph.D., a pediatric hematologist/oncologist with Nemours Children's Clinic, will serve as co-director for two years. Mayo Clinic and Nemours Children's Clinic will provide the physician expertise and experience in blood and bone marrow transplantation. "There's definite synergy when you have a larger program with more physicians discussing patient cases," Solberg says. "More people bringing their knowledge and information to bear on individual cases improves patient care."

"Combining our programs will benefit patients in a number of ways," says Dr. Eric Sandler, Chief of Hematology/Oncology at Nemours Children's Clinic. "The move allows us to combine our knowledge to give the best care possible. It will help the new program earn accreditation to provide more types of transplants than either institution currently offers. And it will also help us develop contracts with insurance companies so that more patients can receive transplants locally."

Mayo's St. Luke's Hospital will maintain 15 transplant beds, and Wolfson Children's Hospital will maintain four transplant beds. A shared information systems network and other clinical and administrative staff from the two former programs will support the new venture.

The move from separate labs to one lab at St. Luke's will help contain costs and advance research goals of the participating institutions. A great deal of current research in the field involves manipulating stem cells in the lab to get certain subsets of cells used for promising, experimental therapies. "By putting all the activity in a consolidated lab, we hope to have enough volume to attract investigators to support these types of research developments and further improve outcomes," Solberg says.

"We will have access to a wider range of clinical material and a wider range of conditions to treat," says George Armstrong Jr., M.D., Medical Director of Wolfson Children's Hospital. "This makes the program more attractive to national study groups."

Paul Pitel, M.D., Chairman of Pediatrics and Associate Medical Director of Nemours Children's Clinic, notes that the Nemours/Wolfson program is one of only three thriving centers in Florida and ranked in the upper half of the nation in terms of patient volume. "We created a program of clinical and academic excellence that met statewide needs," says Pitel. Many of the patient referrals to the former joint Nemours/Wolfson blood and marrow transplant program came from physicians at Nemours Children's Clinics in Jacksonville, Orlando and Pensacola. Referrals to the new program are expected to come from other areas as well.

Dr. Joyce, the current director of the Nemours/Wolfson blood and marrow transplant program, remarked, "I think the most unique thing about this new program is that it began with a group of physicians and institutions asking, 'What's really best for our patients? How can we best configure these services, even if it means difficulty in setting up a complex arrangement like this?'"

This year, 41 patients have received blood or marrow transplants through the combined program. At St. Luke's Hospital, 18 patients received autologous transplants, and seven received allogeneic transplants. At Wolfson Children's Hospital, 11 patients received autologous transplants; four received umbilical cord blood transplants; and one received an allogeneic transplant. (See definitions below.)

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About Mayo Clinic: Mayo Clinic is a multispecialty medical clinic in Jacksonville, Fla. The staff includes 328 physicians working in more than 40 specialties to provide diagnosis, treatment and surgery. Patients who need hospitalization are admitted to nearby St. Luke's Hospital, a 289-bed Mayo facility. Mayo Clinics also are located in Rochester, Minn., and Scottsdale, Ariz.

About Nemours Children's Clinic: Nemours employs about 400 pediatric sub-specialty physicians and surgeons who cared for more than 225,000 complex or chronically ill children in 2001 with more than 870,000 patient visits, making Nemours one of the nation's largest pediatric sub-specialty group practices. Nemours operates in Delaware, Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, while the most visited healthcare Web site online for children and teens, www.kidshealth.org is a project of Nemours. Additional information about Nemours in can be found at www.nemours.org

About Wolfson Children's Hospital: Wolfson Children's Hospital (WCH) is a regional referral hospital serving children and is the only children's hospital in Northeast Florida and Southeast Georgia. Facilities include a patient/clinical tower with a 20-bed pediatric intensive care unit, a 68-bed medical/surgical unit, plus a four-bed pediatric bone marrow transplant unit. WCH also provides a nine-bed Child and Adolescent Behavioral Health Unit, 16 beds dedicated to short stay (observation) patients, four dialysis beds, four clinical research beds, and five neurodiagnostic beds. A 48-bed neonatal intensive care unit is available for critically ill newborns. Additional information on Wolfson can be found at community.e-baptisthealth.com/tools/facilities/wolfson.html.

Blood and marrow transplant facts and terms

Each year about 30,000 Americans are diagnosed with leukemia or another life-threatening disease that can be treated with a hematopoietic stem cell transplant.

Some of the diseases treated:

• Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)
• Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML)
• Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML)
• Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL)
• Hodgkin's disease
• Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma
• Myeloma
• Aplastic anemia

Before a patient is treated with a hematopoietic stem cell transplant, his or her own diseased bone marrow is killed with chemotherapy and/or radiation. Then doctors infuse healthy blood stem cells into the patient. These healthy cells begin to grow and mature into blood platelets and red and white blood cells.

Definitions:

allogeneic transplant: stem cells come from a donor other than the patient

autologous transplant: the patient serves as his or her own source of stem cells

hematopoietic: blood forming

leukemia: a cancer of the white blood cells

lymphoma: a cancer of lymph tissue

myeloma: a cancer of blood plasma

peripheral blood: blood circulating through the body

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