I have spent much of my career working with faculty at schools on both coasts, Stanford and Harvard, convincing them to rethink the way they talk about their science, insisting they make it more understandable to the public.

For many, I had my work cut out just convincing them this was worth the effort. But others seemed to immediately understand that if the public is funding their work through tax dollars, they have an obligation to explain why it matters in easily understandable language. Others were convinced of the value when, after a donor event, I could point to the one faculty member who accepted personal coaching and note that he was the only one to have a donor follow him back to his lab.

At CIRM, we seem to be lucky in having a large number of lead faculty researchers who get it. We had 28 agree to take us up on our challenge to describe their work on a lay level in just 30 seconds, which we dubbed The Elevator Pitch Challenge.

These brave faculty provided too many good examples for me to highlight them all here, but I do want to point out a few that cover some of my pet issues.

Gage Crump (faculty at University of Southern California)- Gage tackles something I have long fought to get the public to understand, the value of animal models. He briskly tells about zebra fish and their ability to regrow parts of their bodies. Then he transitions to the hope that from these little swimmers we could learn how to better repair our bodies. Here’s Gage’s pitch.

Darryl D’Lima (faculty at the Scripps Institute)- Darryl steps in immediately to deliver something I pound into faculty, perspective. He reminds viewers that arthritis impacts more people than heart disease or cancer. He talks about the potential to generate new cartilage and closes with more perspective: that this would be the first time that a treatment would change the progression of this chronic disease. Here’s Darryl’s pitch.

Deepak Srivastava (researcher at the Gladstone institutes, faculty at UC San Francisco)- Deepak gracefully delivers one of my favorite messages, that sometimes the best way to understand how to fix something is to understand how a normal version was created. After noting that adult hearts have very little ability to repair themselves, he talks about using stem cells to unlock the secrets of how hearts develop in a fetus and ends with the hope that this knowledge will guide us in repairing adult hearts. Here’s Deepak’s pitch.

There are many more examples that could be studied by those wanting to perfect the art of clarifying science, like those from Marius Wernig from Stanford University and Edward Hsiao from UCSF. The full roster of pitches can be found here.

D.G.

A year and two days ago, our grantees at Stanford University led by Irv Weissman described their work with a protein that’s found on the outside of cancer cells. They had devised an antibody that latches on to this protein and, in the process, brings those cancer cells to the attention of the immune system, which destroys them.

The work got a lot of attention at the time, and it got more attention yesterday when a reporter apparently misread the 2012 date on the Science paper that first reported the work. Yesterday’s New York Post carried the story, a year and a day after the paper was published rather than the usual one day later for news stories.

Despite that minor news goof, it was a good story explaining work we’re really excited about, hailing the potential therapy as both a “Holy Grail” and “miracle drug”.

Given that the work has yet to be tested in people we’re reluctant to call it a miracle drug, but the work is certainly promising. Weissman has a $20 million award from CIRM to develop the therapy.

The New York Post described the work like this:

The drug works by blocking a protein called CD47 that is essentially a “do not eat” signal to the body’s immune system, according to Science Magazine.

This protein is produced in healthy blood cells but researchers at Stanford University found that cancer cells produced an inordinate amount of the protein thus tricking the immune system into not destroying the harmful cells.

With this observation in mind, the researchers built an antibody that blocked cancer’s CD47 so that the body’s immune system attacked the dangerous cells.

As it so happens, Weissman recently described this research to us in an Elevator Pitch:

A.A.