Thank you, Madam Chairman and members of the committee.
This is my first time appearing before a House of Commons committee, so pardon me if I appear nervous. I am a teacher, so I can stand in front of 200 unruly students and be able to handle them well, but when I get into situations like this, I seem to get very nervous.
My presentation is going to be very brief and non-technical. I want to tell you a story about the Alberta Cord Blood Bank and how we developed a cord blood bank in Alberta.
Our story with cord blood banking began with a little girl in the town of Eckville, Alberta, who I was treating--I am a pediatric hematologist oncologist--for acute lymphoblastic leukemia. She successfully entered remission, but after 18 months she failed. This was in the late 1980s.
Even then we recognized that the only chance of survival for this little girl would be a bone marrow transplantation or, in latter days, a stem cell transplantation. The people in the town of Eckville heard this story and heard about this child, and they decided they wanted to do something about this to ensure that we could find a stem cell donor for her anywhere in the world. They got together and raised funds, and they donated $35,000 to us to look for a transplant source for her.
Unfortunately for her there were no matches in her family. So we approached our colleagues at the University of Minnesota, who looked worldwide for us for a donor for this little girl. None was found and so she died.
In the same year, the townspeople decided that even though she had passed away, they would continue with this fund, hoping that one day it might be useful. They approached the provincial Government of Alberta and got it matched two to one. We had over $100,000 at the time but nothing to do with it.
Then in 1995 I was part of a site visit committee for the National Institutes of Health, and I happened to visit Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in New York, where a Canadian transplant physician, Dr. Blanche Alter, was working. I was the one who reviewed her grant, and it was on the use of cord blood stem cells for the therapy of sickle cell disease. I read that, and I was enthused and amazed at the fact that cord blood stem cells could be used to cure sickle cell disease.
At the meeting, she and I had a conversation, and she encouraged me to get into the field of cord blood banking, because she felt there was a big future in cord blood banking, not just for the treatment of leukemia but for other things.
On my return to Edmonton, I met with Dr. Locksley McGann, who is the foremost authority in Canada on the cryopreservation of mammalian cells, as far as I know, and Dr. Hongyou Yang, a specialist in cryopreservation. We tossed around the idea of developing a public cord blood bank. We spent eight months looking at the logistics of doing this and decided at the end of eight months that it was possible to do. So at the end of that period, we began banking cord blood, and our first cord blood was banked in October 1996, on my birthday.
We have now collected over 10,000 samples of cord blood specimen from across Canada. I have to tell you that it's amazing how generous Canadian mothers and parents are and how they want to help somebody else who might be in need. Canadian physicians across the nation have also been wonderful. None of them has ever asked to be paid for collecting cord blood for our program.
We chose to extend our program across Canada, as you have heard from the previous speakers, based on the fact that we believed that collecting cord blood across Canada would represent the ethnic diversity of the nation, that this was the best way to go. This is true, again, because when you look at the genetics of Canada's aboriginal population, they are unique. And you're not going to find stem cell donors from the registries for that group of patients, but you might find cord blood donors from them if we were successful in collecting cord blood from the deliveries among the aboriginal population.
Our interest in cord blood banking is twofold.
The first is that we agree and believe that cord blood stem cell transplantation is probably going to become the therapy of choice in stem cell transplantation. As has been pointed out before, the morbidity associated with cord blood transplantation is reduced, but the efficacy remains high. So it makes sense to pursue that avenue.
The second reason that cord blood transplantation might become more important is because even today, we are beginning to use cord blood stem cells in adults, and recently there has been the advent of using two cord blood stem cell transplantations because of the larger size of the adult. These seem to be working very well. Our second reason for wanting to bank cord blood stem cells comes from the fact that these stem cells come from an inexhaustible source, and we believe that at a future date they will form a very important component of the stem cells that we might need for treatment with regenerative medicine.
In my days as a pediatric hematologist oncologist treating children with cancer, I had three methods to treat them: cut it out, burn it, or poison them. When you think about it that way, you surely have to say to yourself, “There must be better ways to treat these children.” And lo and behold, it may seem possible that in the future, using stem cells we might indeed be able to repair, rather than do the things that we have been doing in the past. We believe that cord blood stem cells will form a major component of stem cell use in the future.
Madam Chair, I would like to conclude by quoting a favourite quote of mine from George Bernard Shaw, and this tells you why we did what we did. He said, “You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'”
Thank you.