By Leah Beth Ward, Yakima Herald-Republic, Wash.
Jul. 6–Rachel Wright gave her mother nearly an extra three years of life and together they played a pioneering role in the battle against a rare form of cancer called mantle-cell lymphoma.
In the fall of 2005, Rachel, an Eisenhower graduate living in Seattle, allowed researchers to harvest her stem cells for transplantation into her mother, longtime Yakima resident Mary Roche Wright.
Mary received a new immune system from her daughter that would hopefully fight off the lymphoma cells. The odds that Rachel would even be a donor were only 1 in 10,000.
“We often don’t even check the daughter because it’s so unlikely there will be a match,” said Dr. Ajay Gopal of the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, a treatment center that unites expert doctors from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, UW Medicine, a practice run by the University of Washington and Seattle Children’s Hospital & Regional Medical Center.
Once she learned she was, Rachel’s outlook on health, life and happiness changed.
“I stopped believing in statistics and started believing in serendipity,” she said.
Now she’s on a mission to share her mother’s story and educate people about the promising role of stem cells in the war on cancer. The topic is often inflamed by debate over the ethics of using cells derived from 5- to 6-day-old embryos. Stem cells from adults are often misunderstood, said Wright. “I didn’t even know an adult could give stem cells.”
“But stem cells aren’t this big scary thing,” she said. The process of donating them — called apheresis — was a bit daunting.
Rachel was hooked up to a machine two days in a row for four to six hours at a stretch. She watched as her stem cells percolated up into a blood bag. “It felt like growing pains all over my body,” she said.
When enough cells had been collected, the nurses helped her out of bed and took her to her mother’s room. “There was my mom, sitting there, waiting. It was so sci-fi but it was also so natural,” said Rachel, 36, who now lives in New York City where she works for Corbis Corporation, a creative advertising and media company owned by Bill Gates.
The hope was to provide Mary with a long remission and she did enjoy more than two years before the tumor returned. She ultimately succumbed to the chief risk of transplantation — graft versus host disease. Mary’s new immune cells saw her tissues as the enemy and attacked. She died of an infection in May.
“It’s the double-edged sword that we have to learn how to deal with,” Gopal said.
Success in the war on cancer doesn’t come in leaps and bounds, he said.
But Mary’s role — she was only the fifth person in the world to undergo this specific treatment for mantle-cell lymphoma — supplied an important building block.
For Rachel, her brother Jonathan, who is a Seattle urologist, and their father, retired Yakima lawyer Larry Wright, it’s important to keep building. They’ve set up the Mary Wright Memorial Fund at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. The Web site is www.marywrightmemorial.com.
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