Patrizia Durante

When Patrizia Durante was 26 weeks into her first pregnancy, test revealed that she was suffering from acute myeloid leukemia, an aggressive form of blood cancer. She immediately started chemotherapy, but when she didn’t respond to the treatment doctors decided to induce labour so that higher doses could be administered without harming the baby.

As Pierre Laneuville, Director of Hematology at the MUHC, explains, “when Patrizia’s daughter, Victoria, was delivered, we preserved her umbilical cord in liquid nitrogen. At the same time Patrizia was put on the waiting list for a bone marrow transplant and received more chemo.” And yet, as Laneuville continues, “after a short period of remission, the cancer came back in force and it was clear that Patrizia probably wouldn’t survive the wait for a bone marrow match. That’s when we decided to perform the cord cell transplant.” Performed in 2002, this infant-to-mother transplant of umbilical cord cells was the first successful transplant of the kind in Canada. 

Although babies have been successfully treated with their own cord blood for several years, Durante’s procedure was risky because her daughter’s cord cells, which carried her father’s genes as well as her mother’s, were only a 50 percent match. “We knew there was a possibility of rejection, but in some cases mismatches can be therapeutic. Happily, this was one of those cases,” Laneuville says. Both baby and mother are now healthy, and Laneuville and his MUHC colleagues received international attention for the groundbreaking work.