Blood-cord project expanding to aid Asians
A San Francisco-based non-profit organization is preparing to launch an umbilical cord blood collection program that in particular will benefit Asian, Pacific Island and mixed-race patients, for whom supplies are often limited.
The effort by the Joanne Pang Foundation, named for a young leukemia victim – a St. Cecilia Elementary School student who died in 2003 at the age of nine – is a partnership with an existing cord blood bank at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston.
The foundation is in talks with area hospitals to form a collection and storage program, with the foundation responsible for shipping the units to Houston. The goal is to be operational by the end of the year, said Sally Brien Holper, a Pang Foundation board member.
Effectively, the foundation will be establishing the first public cord blood collection program in Northern California. It is widely supported because it is a non-controversial source of stem cells and potentially can help save the lives of people with many blood disorders, including leukemia and sickle cell anemia. As is, most umbilical cord blood is discarded.
The foundation will be accepting cord blood from all donors but will put an emphasis on Asians since their population numbers are great in the Bay Area.
The foundation was launched in 2004, the year after Joanne Pang’s death, and originally had the goal of raising $2.5 million for the first umbilical cord blood bank in the Bay Area. However, the foundation in time realized it would take years to raise the money, and be an expensive process in itself, and the decision was made to partner with an existing cord blood bank.
Fund-raising has not been halted, however, and the foundation hopes to raise from $250,000 to $500,000 in the next two years to cover its costs that will be associated with blood collection and shipping. The foundation is seeking grants, donations from individual donors and plans fund-raising events, including one Feb. 26, 2011, at the San Francisco Zoo.
An Oakland physician, Dr. Bertram Lubin, president and CEO of Children’s Hospital & Research Center Oakland, helped seal the partnership between the foundation and MD Anderson Cancer Center. The foundation and Stanford University Medical Center are finalizing a contract by which the hospital will collect cord blood, and California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco has agreed to move forward on a proposal it collect blood for the foundation.
The foundation was begun by Joanne Pang’s father, Joseph Pang, a chemist, who died this year at 52. He was jogging around Lake Merced, on March 22, 2010, when he collapsed. Since then, the remaining six members of the Joanne Pang Foundation board have carried on his work: Sally Brien Holper, Scott Hildula, Gregory Porter, Helen Vydra Roy, Lisa Napoli and Richard Chan.
By George Raine
From October 1, 2010 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
