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New research reaches Mott patients in the nick of time
“What if you only had a 20 percent chance of living?”That’s the question Rachel Swink, then a seventh grader, posed to her fellow classmates in an article written for her school’s newspaper. The article’s focus was on Enbrel, the drug at the heart of a University of Michigan Health System clinical trial that saved Rachel’s life and, as she wrote, “could save the lives of millions.”
Today, Rachel is a typical eighth grader. She recently began guitar lessons, likes helping her mom in the kitchen and often teases her older brother. But what she’s gone through in just 14 years is not so typical.
Five years after fighting a stage IV neuroblastoma at age 3, doctors found precursor cells to leukemia in her bone marrow. Rachel had a second bone marrow transplant, but this time from a matched, unrelated donor, an option that puts patients at high risk for both short- and long-term complications.
The investigative lab work of Dr. Kenneth Cooke (left) in collaboration with his U-M Blood and Marrow Transplantation team member, Greg Yanik, M.D., proved to be the innovative answer the Swink family was hoping for.
Soon after the transplant, Rachel came down with idiopathic pneumonia syndrome (IPS), a condition where the lungs become so severely inflamed that the patient has serious difficulties breathing. Rachel’s doctors believed that her lungs were under attack by the donor bone marrow.
When Kenneth Cooke, M.D., associate professor for the U-M Department of Pediatrics and Communicable Diseases, first heard about Rachel, she had already been transferred into the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, and her parents were told she had a 20 percent chance of living.
Rachel’s parents made the decision to enroll her in Cooke’s clinical trial using Enbrel, a medication that is FDA approved to treat certain forms of arthritis, but was also found in Cooke’s laboratory to neutralize the protein causing the IPS. That decision saved her life.
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