BY HIS OWN DEVICE

By ELAINE LAFFERTY

It's not that the lab folks at tiny CellPro, Inc. are uninterested in saving lives. It's just that like most biotech researchers, they prefer to toil far away from the gritty reality of illness and human suffering. So when the CEO of their Bothell, Wash., company announced a year ago that he had developed a deadly lymphatic cancer and that his slim chance for survival might rest on their lab results, it was more than they'd bargained for. They already knew their company was fighting for survival, locked in a legal battle over patents with a competitor. Now they were also supposed to save their boss?

Rick Murdock says he did not mean to put pressure on his employees, but his life hung in the balance. At 49, the deceptively tanned and fit executive had just received the kind of diagnosis that is a hypochondriac's nightmare: a rare case of advanced mantle-cell lymphoma. Doctors told him the average life expectancy for the disease was 30 months, and indeed, his initial round of conventional chemotherapy was unsuccessful. But in a coincidence that was both ironic and edifying, CellPro scientists were experimenting with a new way to boost the success rate of the very operation recommended for this type of cancer: a bone-marrow transplant.

In one form of this procedure, doctors remove from the patient's bone marrow a supply of stem cells--the body's blood-making factories--and put them aside for safekeeping. Then they use powerful doses of radiation and chemotherapy to destroy all the cancer cells in the blood--in the process, destroying the healthy blood cells as well. Finally, they try to rebuild the blood supply from scratch by reinfusing the patient with the original stem cells.

Invariably, however, some cancer cells slip in with the stem cells. CellPro was working on a procedure that would reliably separate cancer cells from stem cells. If those cancer cells could be completely purged from the blood, the cancer might not recur. The problem was that CellPro's experiments were still in their infancy. Said Nicole Provost, leader of the purging team: "I told them we needed about nine months. They told me we had eight weeks. Our first reaction was, 'Oh, man.' I mean, this was Rick's life!"

Thus began what Provost and her three-member team called "the Rick project." Their lives now dictated by pagers and cell phones, they took turns in the lab, almost round the clock, running tests over and over. First the stem cells were collected in an elaborate maze of plastic tubing, then they were purged of cancer cells--a confetti of malignant cells sticking to columns of coated beads like flies to flypaper. Unfortunately, the purging process wasn't eliminating all the cancer cells. The experiment seemed to be failing. Then, in a last-minute brainstorm, Provost's team decided to reverse the order: purge the cancer first, then collect the stem cells.

"It worked," said Joe Tarnowski, CellPro senior V.P. "Doing the separations later gave us a second level of purging." With a "compassionate use" waiver from the FDA, the procedure was ready for testing. "Rick was the guinea pig," says Tarnowski.

On June 17, 1996, with Murdock set up on the fifth floor of the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, the trial began. About four hours later, the patient went home, a catheter in his chest, to await the verdict. Tarnowski called that night to tell him that the purging had finally worked. Then began some two months of grueling radiation, chemotherapy and the new, improved bone-marrow transplant.

Almost a year later, Murdock shows no signs of cancer. He is back home, sailing with his sons and watching the salmon swim in a creek a mile from his house. He is too savvy to declare himself cured--that determination could take three years--but he is ready for battle, both to save his company and to get the new device into doctors' hands. CellPro lost the latest round in its patent fight with competitors in federal court in April, and in a month a judge could issue a ruling preventing CellPro from selling its product to new customers. "This is personal now," said Murdock. "I'm not just a CEO. I'm a patient. It would be a crime against humanity if a business dispute kept us from getting this procedure to other patients."

Others agree. Dr. Kent Holland, director of the Hemapheresis Center of the bone-marrow-transplant program at Emory University School of Medicine, is already using the CellPro procedure on young leukemia patients. "I don't have any other device that works as well to offer these people," he says. Another supporter is former Senator Birch Baye, who co-authored the 1980 Baye-Dole Act, which gives the government the power to seize a patent in the name of public health or safety and issue a license. Baye says the CellPro case perfectly illustrates the law's intent: to get new treatments to the people who need them. It may not work, since the law has never been invoked, but neither had anyone ever undergone Murdock's treatment before. And so far the prognosis is good.