Company founder Yael Porat; New Haven trial chief Edouard Aboian.
A nonagenarian is waiting in New Haven for three five-milliliter syringes to arrive from overseas — and help her walk outside the house again and avoid having a limb amputated.
The syringes contain her own white blood cells, “cleaned” and “retrained.”
The woman is the first New Haven participant in an international clinical study of a newly discovered treatment for a condition called Critical Limb Ischemia. The severe condition blocks arteries and thus reduces blood flow, making it too painful for people to walk more than two or four feet at a time. An estimated 150,000 Americans a year with the disease are at risk of having a limb amputated.
Yale New Haven is one of three U.S. hospitals taking part in the $16 million global study conducted by the company developing the treatment, Israel-based BioGenCell. The other two U.S. hospitals are at John Hopkins and the University of California San Francisco. Trials are also taking place in Europe and in Israel.
The New Haven woman is the first of up to 15 who may eventually take part in the New Haven study, which is overseen by YNHH’s Edouard Aboian.
The woman’s blood was drawn Monday and flown overnight to Israel, where BioGenCell will “clean” it, said company founder and CEO Yael Porat, a biotech researcher who discovered and developed the therapy.
“We just wash the white blood cells, and then we take subpopulations of the white cells. One subpopulation is our immune cells. We use our immune cells to direct and to actually ‘teach’ other cells that are much younger and still exist in the blood,” Porat said Tuesday over Zoom from her office in Netanya, Israel, in a conversation on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven” program.
The repurposed cells will now be flown back to New Haven, where they will be injected into the patient’s leg muscle over about 10 minutes. The hope is that they will then “encourage the generation of new, healthy blood vessels” and “regenerate blood flow” to promote healing.
Participants like the New Haven woman will then be monitored for a year to see if, as hoped, she gradually feels less pain and is able to walk again more than a few feet at a time.
Click on the above video to watch the full interview with BioGenCell CEO Yael Porat on WNHH FM’s “Dateline New Haven.” Click here to subscribe to “Dateline New Haven” and here to subscribe to other WNHH FM podcasts.
Anyone interested in learning more about the Yale New Haven study can call 203 – 785-2561 or 203 – 737-2481.