Great Candy Run Helps Babies Still In The Womb

DENVER (CBS4)- The Great Candy Run isn't about Halloween, it's about helping babies who are still in the womb and may be suffering from complications.

The run benefits the Fetal Health Foundation which helps families find answers and resources with a variety of fetal syndromes. The foundation is also spearheading revolutionary new ways that surgeons can help diagnose and treat those syndromes. It was started by a man who was excited about becoming a father.

"Thirteen years ago we were pregnant with identical twins. Two girls so I was going to be wrapped around their fingers in no time. But in the 20th week of our pregnancy we developed a complication called twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome. I had never heard of it but it actually kills more babies per year than SIDS. Many people haven't heard of it. We were given the choice of terminating the pregnancy or letting them die in-utero. You can see that we found some hope and some hope was a week later we were in Tampa, Florida and we did in-utero surgery," said Fetal Health Foundation founder Lonnie Somers. "There are 800,000 pregnancies every year that are affected by some type of dramatic issue. There wasn't any awareness, there weren't any options out there and there wasn't any information and that's why the Fetal Health Foundation was created."

Dr. Rony Marwan is the head of a team that was recently awarded a $25,000 grant from the foundation to continue making strides in this area.

"The current state of the art management of the open Spina Bifida defect as a result of a very well thought out study by the name of MOMS trial," said Dr. Rony Marwan, Asst. Professor of Surgery and Pediatrics. "Basically what we do now is make an incision about this big in the uterus, expose the baby and then cover the defect with the skin and then put the baby back and close the uterus. As you can imagine that comes with significant risks to the mother and prematurity as well.

"What I'm trying to do is come up with a bio-engineering alternative where we can go earlier, 22-23 weeks of gestation and instead of making an incision this big, about maybe 1/10th of an inch and use this gel that will do the same thing and by doing so hopefully increase the chances that we have better outcomes and avoid all complications of prematurity."

The Great Candy Run is Nov. 8 at Washington Park. Registration is at 8:30 a.m. and the run begins at 10 a.m.