'MIRACLE' BRINGS NEW LIFE UMBILICAL-CORD BLOOD GIVES BOYS IMMUNITY.

Byline: Dana Bartholomew Staff Writer

SANTA CLARITA - First went Layne LaRue, a beaut of a babe who might have grown into his fireman father's boots had he not become sick.

Then there were his brothers, Blayke and Garrett, 1-month-old and 3 1/2 years old, who shared the rare immunodeficiency disease that killed little Layne on June 23, 1995. He was 13 months old.

Like the ``boy in the bubble'' dramatized on-screen as an unguarded life against germs, the brothers' immune disorder looked to family and doctors like a death sentence.

Now thanks to a unique procedure that some call a medical miracle, the boys appear likely to wear firefighter uniforms one day, according to a University of California, Los Angeles, study published today in the April edition of The Journal of Pediatrics.

Nearly five years after forgoing chancy bone marrow transplants, the LaRue brothers and a West Los Angeles boy appear healthy after undergoing the world's first umbilical-cord blood transfusions for immunodeficiency diseases at Mattel Children's Hospital at UCLA.

``We think the kids are cured,'' said Dr. E. Richard Stiehm, professor of pediatrics and chief of immunology, whose team of 14 doctors produced healthy boys with the three tablespoons of umbilical-cord blood.

``We completely eliminated the defective immune system through chemotherapy and replaced it with a healthy child's immune system.''

Researchers are hailing the achievement as another boost for a technology less than a decade old.

Used successfully for leukemia and bone marrow diseases, umbilical cord blood transfusions are seen as superior to bone marrow transplants for their rapid availability, better compatibility, easier blood matches and painless extraction with no risk to newborns.

``Until now, the only way to achieve this outcome was through bone marrow - only available through finding the perfect match,'' said Dr. Pablo Rubinstein of the New York Blood Center, which supplied umbilical-cord blood for two of the boys in the UCLA study.

``We expect that they are completely in the clear.''

Rubinstein, who nearly 10 years ago pioneered the umbilical-cord transfusion process, has conducted 1,100 of the 2,000 such operations worldwide and is considered the world's leading researcher on the subject.

A flashback to 1995, when the process was in its infancy:

Couched in the baby seat on a summer trip to the Colorado River, the healthy 13-month-old Layne began to whine. Then vomit. A few days later, he was dead - his lungs full of blood, his liver eaten through, his bone marrow destroyed.

Soon afterward, Blayke and Garrett were diagnosed with the X-linked lymphoproliferative syndrome, otherwise known as XLP, which allowed the Epstein-Barr virus - the same bug that causes mononucleosis - to kill Layne. Aaron, the oldest brother, was spared the congenital noose.

``We were just completely devastated,'' said Teresa LaRue, 34, of Santa Clarita, who with her husband, Scott, 38, had given birth to four blue-eyed sons. ``This just came out of nowhere.

``We were still grieving over Layne and we now learn our other children had this incurable disease and may not live past 10.''

Never once did the couple, regulars at Northpark Community Church in Santa Clarita, lose faith.

It was faith that encouraged Teresa, a homemaker, and her husband, a firefighter-paramedic then with the Alhambra Fire Department, to try an experimental medical procedure after no immediate marrow matches were found.

And it was faith that encouraged doctors to destroy three young immune systems in 1996, inject umbilical-cord blood flown in on a passenger seat from New York and Dusseldorf, Germany, and expect a white-blood-cell miracle to occur.

For weeks, nothing happened.

Blayke, the first UCLA umbilical-cord blood recipient at 8 months old, could neither eat formula nor Gerber food. His brain bled. And his temperature shot up to 107 degrees.

The doctors persevered; the family prayed each day for white blood cells, evidence of an immune system.

``We both prayed a lot,'' Teresa recalls. ``We had a prayer chain. People called other people, family members, everyone they knew - even a church in Arizona, even people we didn't know were praying for our children.''

Meanwhile, for two years the 77 firefighters at the Alhambra Fire Department volunteered to assume the 24-hour shifts for Scott so he could stand by his boys.

And to cover the $5,000 to $6,000 a year in family insurance deductibles for millions of dollars worth of care, the Alhambra firefighters held golf tournaments, bake sales, spaghetti dinners and other fund and bone marrow drives.

``The kids look great; it's pretty much a miracle,'' said Ron Thurston, 41, an engineer for the department. ``It was a good deal: Everyone pitched in and helped out - the Fire Department would do it for anybody.''

It was in April 1997 that Garrett, a towhead child who dreamed of riding motorcycles since he was 2, left the hospital wearing a chemotherapy crew cut and hospital mask.

``He rode his Big Wheel out the door of the hospital and never looked back,'' said his mother. ``Out the front door and down the steps.

``It's a miracle,'' she said of the family that now water-skis, rides motorcycles and otherwise embraces the outdoors together with Garrett, a jokester of 8, and Blayke, a precocious 5-year-old.

``Our whole goal is to educate people in the prospect of the couple ounces of fluid that gave life to one baby and can also save the life of another.''

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2 photos

Photo:

(1 -- color) Thanks to a unique procedure, Teresa LaRue can sit with sons Blayke, 5, and Garrett, 8, who are now both healthy after undergoing umbilical-cord blood transfusions.

(2) Teresa LaRue plays a game with her three sons, Blayke, 5, left, Garrett, 8, second from right, and Aaron, 11.

John McCoy/Staff Photographer