My husband left a lifesaving legacy
Ian Rosenberg paved the way for stem-cell therapy to be available to all heart patients, his proud widow tells Radhika Sanghani
Ian Rosenberg was 66 when his heart began to fail. From being a relatively fit and healthy man, he suddenly struggled to breathe, could no longer climb stairs and was, as his wife Jenifer recalls, “in a very bad way indeed”. “It was tough,” she says, 14 years on from her husband’s diagnosis. “He’d had heart problems before, but you never think your heart will fail, and your sixties is not old age. When he couldn’t breathe, it was a complete shock.”
Rosenberg was diagnosed with heart failure so severe that he was given only two months to live. Doctors found just 7 per cent of his heart was functioning, meaning he could be put on the waiting list for a transplant, but that would take several months, perhaps years – far longer than his given life expectancy.
The only other option was to visit Germany, where revolutionary stem-cell trials, which involve using a patient’s own bone marrow to repair damaged heart muscle, were taking place.
“When we heard about the trials in Germany, we didn’t think twice about going,” explains Jenifer, now 74 and an OBE. “He had the treatment and, within a few weeks, the difference was unbelievable. After about a month, you could see an improvement, the biggest being that he could walk up the stairs and not be out of breath. It was amazing.”
The procedure involved stem cells being taken from Ian’s bone marrow, concentrated in a laboratory, and then injected back into his heart through his groin. The stem cells regenerate the heart and, unlike a transplant, carry less risk of being rejected by the body.
For many of its participants, including Ian, the treatment was a success, yet it could not be made available in the UK due to a lack of funds – and red tape. For it to be approved for NHS funding by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice), a certain number of patients would first have to be successfully treated to prove whether it was deserving of public money.
Jenifer recalls how incensed Ian was by what seemed to him to be a bureaucratic Catch-22.
“He thought it was wrong that you had to go abroad to pay for a treatment from which others like him would benefit in a big way. He wanted to make it available to everyone. So he asked his doctors: ‘How much do you need to make this happen?’ They said: ‘£6.5 million’, and he said: ‘I’ll get it for you.’ ”
The Rosenbergs, already retired after selling their successful textile business, devoted their energies to fundraising for the necessary research trials. In 2004, their charity, the Heart Cells Foundation, was born.
Having spent the past decade funding the necessary trials, earlier
‘It’s our goal to make this treatment available to all who need it on the NHS’
this year they were given the all-clear to start paying for the treatments, which cost about £10,000 a time, and will now become “routine” in Britain.
It is unusual for an NHS operation to be funded by charitable donation, but since the programme opened last year at St Bart’s, the City of London’s renowned teaching hospital, 50 stem-cell therapies have been paid for by the charity, on top of the 300 patients they treated during their research trials.
“The concept of it happening in an NHS hospital and being financed by a charity is unique,” explains Jenifer, who started her career at Marks & Spencer and, years later, won a Veuve Clicquot Business Women Award for her work in the fashion industry. “But it’s working. It means we will now be able to treat patients throughout the UK who have a heart condition, where there’s no alternative treatment, with their own stem cells.
“It’s our goal for this to be a normal NHS procedure, so everyone who has a heart problem [and could benefit from this] will be able to. There are few downsides because there’s no rejection, as they’re your own stem cells, and every patient who has successfully had this treatment ends up taking less medication.”
Jenifer is overjoyed with the progress already made, and she knows that Ian would be, too, had he lived to tell his story.
For Ian, the treatment gave him an extra three years of life, but in 2006 he died from heart failure, at the age of 70.
“He would be so thrilled,” says Jenifer. “His concern would be that we’re not doing it quick enough, because for him everything had to be done immediately. But to have achieved this much… well, the medical world says we’ve done it all in a very short space of time.”
The couple spent their final years together alternating between their family home in St John’s Wood, north London, and a holiday home in Miami.
They were both each other’s second spouses, having married in 1980 after a whirlwind romance in Cannes – Jenifer’s first husband had died, while Ian had divorced his wife – and did not have children together. But Ian had two children from his first marriage, as well as two grandchildren, who he was able to spend those extra three years with.
“We made the most of it,” smiles Jenifer. “We always had holidays. We used to go sailing on our wonderful boat. I thought he’d always be there. But he made his 70th birthday, and that was so important. He had the friends, family and children there. It was very, very special.”
Around 800,000 people in the UK suffer from heart disease or failure, of which 10 to 20 per cent could benefit from stem-cell therapy. Gordon Foster, 59, who took part in the Heart Cells Foundation-funded stem-cell trials, becoming the first person to receive the pioneering treatment in the UK last year, says: “I’m now able to lead a near-normal life, and I’m enjoying every moment that I spend with my wife and children.
“Not only has the stem-cell treatment helped to improve my physical health, but it has also massively improved my mental health, too. Now, I live every day with hope for the future.”
The charity has since secured funding to help a further 50 patients, with 37 already on the waiting list.
Jenifer cannot quite believe how much her late husband has been able to achieve – in a field he knew little about. “It’s like he’s still here, all around us,” she says. “It’s wonderful, really. If it wasn’t for him being ill, going to Germany and coming back so annoyed, none of this would have ever happened.”