A cancer researcher at an Illinois Catholic medical center is working to grow umbilical-cord stem cells in his laboratory, using $1.4 million in funding from the Illinois Regenerative Medicine Institute.

Dr. Patrick Stiff of Loyola University Medical Center in Maywood hopes to use the umbilical-cord stem cells to develop new immune cells, to be implanted first in mice and then, if all goes well, in humans.

Although the Catholic Church is not opposed to stem-cell research using umbilical-cord blood, the Catholic Conference of Illinois opposes the institute, which Gov. Rod Blagojevich created last year with a $10 million line item in the budget after he failed to win legislative approval.

Zach Wichmann, assistant director of the conference, said the public policy arm of the Illinois Catholic bishops opposes both the purpose of the institute, which awards grants for projects dealing with embryonic as well as nonembryonic stem cells, and the back-door process used by the governor to create it.

"Even if all the money went to adult stem-cell research, the process was still wrong," Wichmann said.

The church opposes embryonic stem-cell research because it involves the destruction of embryos.

That's not the case with the stem cells in umbilical-cord blood, said Stiff. Umbilical-cord stem cells are routinely discarded after babies are born, although more parents are choosing to donate umbilical-cord blood or bank it because their own children might need it in the future.

Umbilical-cord-blood stem cells are far less likely to be rejected by a recipient's body, Stiff said, so doctors do not need to find a perfect match, as they do for a bone marrow transplant.

Loyola and other hospitals already use cord blood --- whose cells are similar to very primitive bone marrow cells --- for bone marrow transplants, a common treatment for cancers of the blood and bone marrow.

The problem is, he said, that there simply aren't enough cells in each umbilical cord.

"If we want to transplant (them into) a 20-pound kid, it's no problem," he told The Catholic New World, newspaper of the Chicago Archdiocese. "But if we want to transplant (them into) a stocky Midwesterner who weighs 250 pounds, there's not enough cells."

But if Stiff and his team of researchers could take the cells from an umbilical cord and make them reproduce themselves outside the body, they could make enough to treat adults, he said.

Loyola has performed more than 40 adult umbilical-cord-blood transplants already and was the first to report the successful use of cells grown outside of the body for transplantation purposes. Loyola has the largest bone marrow transplantation program in Illinois, performing 160 transplants each year.

"The goal of the umbilical-cord-blood stem-cell transplant is to replace diseased or nonfunctional stem cells with healthy stem cells," said Stiff, professor of medicine and pathology at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

"The transplant can also be used to replace a cancer patient's bone marrow cells that are damaged from high-dose chemotherapy or radiation therapy," he added. "These new cells may cause the bone marrow to again function normally."

Stiff's $1.4 million was the second-largest grant awarded by the institute, which operates as part of the Illinois Department of Public Health, in its first round of funding this spring. The largest grant, nearly $2 million, was awarded to Dr. Ronald Hoffman at the University of Illinois at Chicago, for work with both embryonic and nonembryonic stem cells.

Three of the remaining eight grants, totaling more than $1.6 million, focus on adult bone marrow or umbilical stem cells.

Even without church teaching forbidding the destruction of embryos, Stiff said there are all kinds of problems posed by procuring enough embryos to pursue embryonic stem-cell research. Most proponents talk about using the thousands of "spare" embryos frozen and stored in fertility clinics, he said. But so far, the number of embryos whose parents have released them for research would lead to only a few dozen embryonic stem-cell lines --- not enough for meaningful work.

"To expect that parents will suddenly start giving their embryos to research would be folly," he said.

---CNS