(February 2017) Dr. Joseph McGuirk of the University of Kansas Cancer Center, has been treating cancer patients for 27 years. He has always been excited and optimistic about the future of his patients, but never like he is now. “Every day is an exciting day,” McGuirk says. “We are in the midst of a revolution in cancer medicine right now.”
Chance Runnion is just one beneficiary of that revolution. He returned from a Caribbean cruise with family and friends, and in short order a red dot on the inside of his right knee grew to the size of a softball. After getting it checked out, the diagnosis came back the same day: leukemia. The first thing Chance thought was, “I’m going to die.”
Dr. McGuirk remembers a time when most patients who came to his clinic with Chance’s form of cancer, died in a relatively short period of time. Today, he says, more than half of them will live, thanks to adult stem cell transplants. Still, Dr. McGuirk knows that there is much more to be done, and that the promise of adult stem cells is not close to being exhausted. His mission: “to make the world better for others.”
Chance underwent an adult stem cell transplant, and he says he knows that the transplant is saving his life. Dr. McGuirk notes, “One of the reasons I’m so excited about adult stem cell therapy [is] because this young man is going to get his life back on track and get back to college and have a family and do things he wants to do in life and deserves to be able to do in life. He can make his contribution to make things better for others.”
Many others like Chance are currently being treated using ethically-derived, non-controversial adult stem cell transplants, which do not require the destruction of young human life. In fact, Dr. McGuirk says, “I am not aware that embryonic stem cells… have been used as a life-saving therapy for anyone with any disorder.” Meanwhile, well over one million patients worldwide have been treated using adult stem cell transplants. In 2014 alone, nearly 20,000 bone marrow and umbilical cord blood transplants were performed in the United States, according to the national Health Resources and Services Administration’s Blood Cell Transplant Report.
You can read more about the lifesaving successes of adult stem cells at the Charlotte Lozier Institute.