Treatment ‘stems’ hope

Kit Bond was getting ready for bed when his friend came by, wanting to go out to the bars.

Bond had just finished a full day’s work with his grandfather on the farm and was pretty tired, but he decided to give in to his friend’s request and got dressed.

It was early into the night, probably about 11 p.m.

He had been at the bar for about an hour when he got sleepy and went out to his friend’s 2001 Chevy Silverado to take a nap while his friend stayed inside.

A sleeping Bond didn’t notice when his friend came out of the bar and started the truck.

When Bond woke up, his leg was on fire and he couldn’t feel anything below his waist.

The truck had rolled three times, and he couldn’t move to escape the wreckage.

His friend pulled him from the debris — and that’s where things start to get hazy.

“The last thing I remember before passing out was just like knowing I was going to die and feeling a complete sense of peace and looking up at the stars and saying a prayer,” Bond said.

Emergency responders revived Bond on the scene and rushed him to the hospital.

Bond is a biology and biochemistry senior who has lived his life as a quadriplegic since that accident Aug. 2, 2003.

Six years later, Bond has taken quite a different approach to his rehabilitation.

He has traveled to Portugal and most recently China to receive adult stem cells inserted into his body.

He cannot receive the treatment in the United States because it has not yet been approved.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration recently approved the first phase of research on humans for multiple companies to begin types of stem cell treatments nationwide, said Paul Kincade, head of the Immunology and Cancer Research Program at the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation.

This past Monday, for example, the FDA approved Neuralstem, a company based in Maryland, to use spinal cord stem cells in a Phase I trial to treat patients with Lou Gehrig’s disease, according to the company’s Web site.

Kincade, who regularly works with stem cells, said the research is where some of the most promising scientific discoveries are happening.

Although the research is progressing rather quickly by scientific standards, it can be agonizingly slow for a patient waiting for a certain type of stem cell treatment to be approved, he said.

“In this country, especially, we’re very careful of doing treatments that could be helpful until we’ve done clinical trials,” Kincade said.

Bond went through with stem cell injections because of the reparative qualities that stem cells possess.

With Bond’s treatments, doctors place stem cells in a specific location — in this case, the spinal cord — in hopes those stem cells will work to repair the region.

Kincade said the goal is to put stem cells into a tissue where they will regenerate what’s needed, listening to the environmental cues to allow them to do what they’re placed there to do.

One clarification that Bond and his family make is that Bond is not receiving embryonic stem cells — a topic that has spawned an ongoing political debate.

A conservative family from Hugoton, Kan., none of them agrees Bond should ever receive embryonic stem cells — and neither does Bond.

Before the accident, Bond stood at 6 feet 6 inches tall, weighing 220 pounds with about 8 percent body fat. After the accident, he dropped to 135 pounds in about three weeks.

He completed Army Basic training in the summer of 2000 before his senior year of high school. With a full-ride scholarship to Kansas State University through the Army, he had plans to enroll in the Army ROTC program, graduate and have a career in the military, following in the footsteps of his grandfather, a WWII veteran.

Meanwhile, his unit was expected to be deployed to Iraq. A couple of months into school, he would have gone to Camp Anaconda, a large U.S. base near Balad, Iraq, for 13 months.

When the accident happened, Bond was about five days from moving to Manhattan, Kan., to start his freshman year at Kansas State.

But all that changed.

Bond enrolled at OSU in 2004 — primarily because he wanted to get his life in order and OSU was the most accessible campus he and his family toured.

In December 2004, Bond found out, thanks to some Internet research, about a stem cell program in Portugal.

He and his family flew to Portugal for his first treatment May 2005.
While there, doctors took olfactory tissue, the tissue that controls sense of smell, from Bond’s nasal cavity — rich in stem cells — and harvested the stem cells from the tissue.

Next, they implanted the stem cells into the spinal cord.

The surgery was more painful than Bond expected.

“Basically, they opened me up from my neck to the shoulder blades, pulled everything aside and got into the spinal cord,” Bond said.

Bond was the 54th person in the world to have the procedure done.
Although he knew it was risky, he said it was worth it.

Immediately after the surgery, Bond’s body regained the ability to regulate temperature. Before that moment, Bond had a problem where he always felt cold — a common problem among quadriplegics.

“It was the best feeling in the world,” Bond said. “I felt a cold breeze and thought, ‘Oh, this is OK.’”

After the procedure, Bond moved to Atlanta to participate in therapy specialized for spinal cord injuries. After a year in Atlanta, Bond moved back to Stillwater to finish school.

In December 2007, Bond found out about Beike Biotechnology, a company based in China that focuses on adult stem cell technologies, according to its Web site.

The company began January 2005 and has treated more than 2,500 patients as of January 2008, according to its Web site. Because each patient receives at least four stem cell treatments, the company has performed more than 10,000 transplants using umbilical cord stem cells, according to its Web site.

Bond and his family left for China in late May 2008.

This time around, Bond wouldn’t have to receive a surgery like in Portugal.

Instead, he stayed for about five weeks and received seven injections of umbilical cord stem cells.

Doctors inserted the stem cells not only through injections into his spine but also through an IV.

Trey Ratzlaff, a physical therapist assistant at Stillwater Medical Center’s Total Health, has worked with Bond since before he started the stem cell treatments.

Ratzlaff said after Bond’s first trip to China, he was convinced the treatments were working after Bond came in for therapy for the first time after returning.

“Before, I always had to help him get on the treatment table,” Ratzlaff said. “He said, ‘Hey, watch what I can do,’ and then he got himself up on the table and rolled around and got himself sitting up on his own. I almost had tears in my eyes.”

Bond’s next trip to China was May 2009 where he received six injections.
Bond said he has gained a lot more independence and strength in his core and his arms thanks to the stem cell injections.

However, the treatments definitely come with a monetary cost health insurance doesn’t cover.

Danny Harvey, Bond’s stepfather, said the treatments, plane tickets for Bond and his family, lodging and food along with other miscellaneous costs total between $45,000 and $50,000 per trip.

But Harvey said he doesn’t mind the cost because of the benefits for his son.

After each treatment, Bond is always in an even better mood and his independence increases, Harvey said.

“We wouldn’t keep doing it if there weren’t some kinds of signs,” he said.
Harvey is not skeptical the stem cell treatments are working.

“Since we’ve started, he has went from 20 prescriptions to five,” Harvey said. “That’s a sign of independence to us.”

Harvey said Bond’s siblings have noticed improvements in their brother, as well.

Bond’s younger sister, Kiley Harvey, 23, lives in Las Vegas, and said every time she sees her brother, he has more strength and more control.

Kiley Harvey said her brother is optimistic but also realistic about the stem cells and how the treatments will benefit him.

“He has got his head on straight,” she said. “He’s not trying to do all these stem cell treatments and things like that with the possibility of winning a marathon. For the most part, he’s doing it to help him benefit from day-to-day life, which for someone like him in that situation is a huge, huge, huge advancement.”

Stem Cell Basics

What are stem cells?

Stem cells are similar to freshmen who haven’t yet selected a major.
They’re cells that don’t have a specialized function yet. They are able to develop into different cell types during early life.

Also, in many of your body’s tissues, “they serve as a sort of internal repair system, dividing essentially without limit to replenish other cells as long as the person or animal is still alive.”

What are the different kinds of stem cells?

You’ve probably heard someone discuss embryonic stem cells, possibly during a political debate.

“Embryonic stem cells, as their name suggests, are derived from embryos. Most embryonic stem cells are derived from embryos that develop from eggs that have been fertilized in vitro — in an in vitro fertilization clinic — and then donated for research purposes with informed consent of the donors.”

Meanwhile, there are also adult stem cells, the cells that don’t have yet have a specialized role in the body.

What are the similarities and differences between embryonic and adult stem cells?

One major difference between adult and embryonic stem cells is their different abilities in the number and type of different cell types they can become, according to the institute.

Embryonic stem cells can become all cell types of the body because they are pluripotent, or have the ability to give rise to all of the various cell types of the body. Adult stem cells are thought to be more limited.

“Embryonic stem cells can be grown relatively easily in culture. Adult stem cells are rare in mature tissues, so isolating these cells from an adult tissue is challenging, and methods to expand their numbers in cell culture have not yet been worked out.”

Source: The National Institutes of Health, http://stemcells.nih.gov/