Roanoke Times

July 17, 2003

An insurance company, hospital and federal regulators have approved a Roanoke youngster with a severe intestinal disease to have an experimental stem-cell transplant that could cure or kill him.

Thirteen-year-old Jordan Fifer heads to Children's Memorial Hospital in Chicago later this month.

People ask him if he is scared or afraid of dying. He tells them he's not.

"I don't know why I am not scared. I'm just not," he said. "I'm incredibly eager. And I just know when I come back, I will be able to do things that I haven't been able to do for so long and that means a lot to me."

Like eat a piece of pizza and have the energy to play soccer.

Jordan, who this fall will be a freshman at Patrick Henry High School and the Roanoke Valley Governor's School for Science and Technology, was stricken with Crohn's disease at about age 10. With Crohn's, the digestive system comes under attack by the immune system. When the disease is active, it causes stomach aches, diarrhea, rectal bleeding, weight loss, fatigue and fever.

About a million Americans have Crohn's or a similar condition, ulcerative colitis, according to the Crohn's and Colitis Foundation of America. There is no known cure.

Jordan had tried without success to get relief through a variety of prescription drugs and other traditional therapies. His mother, Hope Trachtenberg-Fifer, learned about a Chicago medical team that has treated about a dozen Crohn's patients, adults and children, with a transplant of blood stem cells.

Jordan's health insurer - he's insured through his dad Gary's health plan - this week approved paying part of the cost for Jordan to have a transplant. He will be the youngest person treated so far.

Blood stem cells are the building blocks of blood inside the bones. Already, blood stem cell transplants correct disorders of the blood and disease-fighting immune system and repair damage to such systems caused by some cancer treatments, such as chemotherapy.

But until the transplant has been proved to address Crohn's, it is classified by the federal government as an experimental treatment. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration