UW-Madison researcher Kurt Saupe died Saturday at the age of 50 following a battle with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, according to this UW School of Medicine and Public Health news release. I got to know Saupe during the late summer of 2009 and wrote this article about his efforts to battle the disease, which included receiving a new immune system via a stem cell transplant from a donor in May 2008. Although this blood cancer is relatively curable among children, for middle-age adults ALL is extremely rare and very lethal. Saupe also used stem cells in his research, with the university reporting he most recently was working on creating a stem-cell patch for damaged heart tissue -? work that likely will be published posthumously.
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