Don Ho Recovering after Stem Cell Treatment

By Chawadee Nualkhair

BANGKOK — Hawaiian crooner Don Ho is recovering in a Thai hospital after undergoing an experimental stem-cell treatment yet to be approved in the United States.

Ho, the 75-year-old singer of standards such as "Tiny Bubbles" and "I’ll Remember You," suffered from an ailing heart that made it difficult for him to do normal things such as climbing stairs, his doctor, Kitipan Visudharom, said on Friday.

"He told me sometimes it was hard for him to finish a song," said Kitipan, chief cardio-thoracic surgeon at the Bangkok Heart Hospital, who injected stem cells into Ho’s heart on Tuesday.

"It will take time. At least a couple of months before we see a good result," he said. "Usually we send them home in four days. But in his case we may have to wait just to be safe."

The use of stem cells — master cells in the body which can develop into any cell type — can pose an ethical dilemma because those derived from very early human embryos are considered the most promising for treating human diseases.

South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-suk, whose team made global headlines by developing tailored embryonic stem cells and producing the world’s first cloned dog, sparked a storm of controversy after admitting two junior women researchers had donated their eggs for his work.

But stem cells harvested from a patient’s own blood may not only sidestep thorny ethical issues but could also prove safer than cells from embryos, said Robert Clark, chairman of Theravitae, which developed the technology used in Ho’s surgery.

The harvested stem cells are allowed to multiply before being injected into a patient’s heart or arteries to regenerate diseased tissue, considered the first such procedure of its kind.

"We tried very, very hard to make a product which was first morally and ethically correct. To do that, we only work with a person’s own blood," said Clark, in Bangkok for the procedure.

"The reality is your body has everything it needs to build and repair your body," he said. Embryonic tissue "will never be safe. Because it’s not from you."

The treatment, which costs around $30,000, has been performed on 70 people since a clinical trial in August 2004, mostly in Thailand, Clark estimates.

More than 30 percent of the patients have come from the United States and "virtually all" had shown signs of improvement, he said.

Clark said the procedure was likely to become available in the United States in 5 to 10 years, but that he expected a steady growth in the number of heart patients seeking the treatment in Thailand.

"By June of next year, 100 people a month could be coming to Thailand for this procedure," he said.

Ho, for his part, was in good spirits and was scheduled to leave on Sunday, said Haumea Hebenstreit, his assistant.

"He’s feeling wonderful. From the minute we arrived he’s had a positive mental attitude," she said. "Before they finished stitching him up, he was joking with everybody, wanting to kiss the doctors, the nurses."

(Additional reporting by Noppawan Bunluesilp)