Ross-Vaden is the United States representative for Beike Bio-Technologies, of Shenzen, China. She became an expert on stem cells after her son, Justin, was born.

“My son was born with a severe brain injury,” Ross-Vaden said in a telephone interview last week from Chicago. “He had a massive number of strokes in his brain. He lost 50 percent of his brain mass. Because of this, I started researching stem cells.”

She connected with a non-profit group that was helping families cope with the same issues she was facing. That’s how she met the people from China.

“Justin came here to set me on a path. He knew that I was on the right path and that I needed to pursue the path after he died almost two years ago,” Ross-Vaden said. “His life had great impact and his death had an even greater impact on my life. He is the reason Rylea can see.”

Her son did respond to the stem-cell treatments, but the damage to his brain was too extensive to be corrected.

Ross-Vaden looks at stem cells as science. But, the circumstances associated with her son’s illness and his death, and how that would impact Rylea she views as a miracle.

“Everything merged,” she said. “All of the different components were directly related to him. All of the pieces came together perfectly. When that happens, that’s a miracle. I would not have been so passionately motivated about this had it not been for Justin.”

It was in December of last year when Barlett found an e-mail address for Ross-Vaden, a 42-year-old registered nurse who works out of her home for Beike Bio-Technologies.

“Dawn sent an e-mail in the middle of the night through our Web site, asking if there was any possibility that her daughter could see,” Ross-Vaden said. “I had been looking at various disorders for the last several months, but had not looked at optic-nerve hypoplasia. It caught my attention.”

That was when Ross-Vaden decided to educate herself about the disorder affecting Rylea.

“It took several days going back and forth with Dawn before I could work through the process in my own head and before I decided this was something that would be considered reasonable and viable,” she said.

“I talked more with Dawn to make sure she understood the circumstances — that everyone in the entire world considered it non-treatable,” she said. “They had not even bothered to try and treat it. There was absolutely no scientific evidence to back my theory and that I was simply making an educated decision about whether Rylea should be taken to China for treatment.”

Ross-Vaden thought the procedure might help because of the work she had been doing with brain-injured children since the birth of her son.

“A child with a severe brain injury can have various visual problems, including atrophy of the optic nerve,” she said. “It’s because of the lack of use of their vision. I was helping families to seek alternative treatments and one treatment was stem cells.

“Some of my patients with multiple sclerosis also had optic neuropathy. After treatment with stem cells, they reported motor-function improvement and improved vision. In some cases, some amazing visual changes occurred.”