Hope For Brain Damage

 

Two year old Sparrow Morris drowned in her family's pool and as a result lost oxygen for approximately 45 minutes and suffered two cardiac arrests. She was not expected to live. She did survive the drowning, but was but left with significant brain damage

 

She was a beautiful two year old who only functioned at the level of a 3 month old infant.

 

Fortunately, her parents had stored her cord blood stem cells with Cord Blood Registry. A year after her accident her parents were called by Cord Blood Registry and were told about an experimental treatment they were involved in at Duke University. Little Sparrow went to Duke University where she was treated with an infusion of her own cord blood stem cells. Within a day, her parents reported a dramatic improvement and she continues to improve. Her parents report she has not reached a plateau in her recovery since the stem cell treatment.

 

New Heart Foundation and Cord Blood Registry together have patent pending protocols to treat stroke, cerebral palsy, brain trauma, and low oxygen injury to the brain. Cord blood registry has successfully treated cerebral palsy and is actively recruiting patients for stroke, brain trauma, and low oxygen injury to the brain.

 

Unfortunately, many patients suffer from these conditions. In addition, there is little in the way of available treatments for these conditions. United States statistics for these conditions include: Stroke: 6 million patients, Brain Trauma: 1.7 million, and Cerebral Palsy: 1million.

 

Dr Franco has been desperate to offer the benefits of cord blood stem cells to all the patients with brain damage and serious neurologic deficit diseases but is stymied because most parents have not banked their children's cord blood.

 

Stem cells from lost baby teeth and wisdom teeth are being banked but are generally of lower quality. Dr Franco is now working with a Gurnee dentist, Dr Ira L Shapira who is president of Dato-Tech and has method and device patents on the collection of stem cells from minimally invasive prophylactic removal of wisdom tooth buds before calcification.

 

Dr Shapira's vision was to reduce the morbidity of wisdom tooth removal while simultaneously collecting and storing stem cells from the developing tooth bud. These may actually be more powerful for treating neurologic injuries because they develop from the neural crest. Dr Shapira's concept was published in a letter to the editor in the July 2010 JADA, Journal of the American Dental Association on morbidity associated with third molar removal.

 

Dr Wayne Franco considered these cells an answer to a prayer. He would now be able to help an even greater number of patients. Dr Shapira believed the best time to collect cells was between 8-10 years old when it could be done in a minimally invasive procedure in just a few minutes.

 

Dr Franco has taken this one step further. Utilizing Dr Shapira's easy technology stem cells can be collected at almost any time until 10 years old from other developing teeth with little or no discomfort. This would cause a loss of a tooth but this is a small price if brain trauma, cerebral Palsy or other conditions can be alleviated or drastically improved.

 

Dr Franco calls this "The Second Chance" and hopes by combining his work with Dr Shapira's a new paradigm can be created.

 

The doctors are currently looking for a manufacturer for the device that collects and stores the stem cells for processing and a storage facility. Dr Franco has already made contact with Cord Blood Registry and several other storage facilities. Patients with serious problems could have the cells processed and directly infused. Dr Franco would like to see a single storage company for all stem cell collections from tooth buds. If there is a paradigm change this could literally be millions of samples per year.

 

There are two collection sites that are ideal in most patients and one could be used for personal storage while a second could conceivably be used for public banking, research or as a back-up for personal use possibly at a second storage site.

 

The collection of stem cells from developing tooth buds has many advantages in ease of collection and scheduling compared to Cord Blood. In Japan Hepatocytes, or liver cells have been grown from stem cells from tooth buds. The stem cells from the tooth bud contain epithelial stem cells, nerve stems, blood vessel stem cells and the typical mesenchymal stem cells found in extracted teeth.

 

Contact Wayne Franco MD, CEO,

New Heart Foundation

1-860 305 6041