When the long-awaited moment arrived, a nurse helped Adam Hess loosen a tiny plastic clamp on an intravenous line leading to the chest of his son, who lay asleep in a bed at Boston Children’s Hospital.
Millions of stem cells that were collected from 6-year-old Conner Hess’s blood in January flowed through the IV and entered his bloodstream. They had been modified in a lab by adding a functional gene to compensate for a defective one. Conner’s doctors expect that this groundbreaking gene therapy, which costs a staggering $3 million a patient, will stave off a fatal degenerative brain disease and save his life.
“You’re getting your stem cells back, baby,” Conner’s mother, Richelle Brooks, said on the other side of the bed, wiping her tears with a tissue as excited hospital employees crowded the room.
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