Mark Strome

bump?

Thanks a bunch, I need CapIQ.

A rather amazing story:

http://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/hmn/w06/medical.cfm#8

Mark Strome felt like one lucky guy as he drove his silver Maserati toward his mother's birthday party in June 1999. Every financial publication had recently touted his skill in creating one of the world's most successful hedge funds. But on that June morning, the Los Angeles financier got the first signal that his future may have hit a roadblock—a nosebleed that wouldn't stop. Skipping the party, Strome drove straight to his physician, who cauterized his nose. When the bleeding kept on, the doctor ordered tests and found that Strome's platelet count was 1,000 out of a normal 200,000. “Go immediately to the hospital,” he directed. “And don't bump your head or you'll die.” A week later, Strome learned he had severe aplastic anemia (SAA), an amazingly rare disease in which the body's immune system renders the stem cells incapable of producing red and white blood cells and platelets. Death usually comes in one to two years. Strome's LA hematologist suggested standard treatments—bone marrow transplant or the “gold-standard” drug, ATG (antithymocyte globulin). In Strome's case, no suitable donor appeared for him to have a bone marrow transplant, so he went on the drug. But ATG leaves patients wide open to side effects like infection, hormonal imbalance and osteoporosis. Up to half also have a relapse or develop some type of malignant blood disease. Strome followed the script. First, he improved and then the SAA came back. By August 2000, he'd run out of options. And at that crucial moment, a psychiatrist friend surfing the Web discovered Rob Brodsky. Brodsky, a 44-year-old Johns Hopkins hematologist, has been achieving extraordinary results with SAA patients by treating them with a novel protocol. First, he gives them massive doses of the immunosuppressant cyclophosphamide, which stuns the bone marrow and sends already low blood counts plummeting to zero. Then, he waits as patients' decimated immune systems miraculously begin “rebooting” and return to what Brodsky describes as a “healthy, virgin state, like that of a newborn child.” Once that happens, the person's chance of developing SAA again becomes remote. Two weeks later, Strome was in Brodsky's office hearing that the likelihood he could be cured was about 70 percent. But he would need to endure 12-hour days of drug infusions plus debilitating side effects. His treatments began the next week, followed by terrible nausea and a lung infection. But by Halloween of 2000, Mark Strome was back in LA, working out five times a week. Today, he is completely healthy. Since then, Strome has donated $2 million to Brodsky's SAA research. “I used to be the Lone Ranger,” Strome says. “I thought I could solve everything by myself. Now, I'm alive, but the Lone Ranger is dead.”