Cynthia Schaffer supports CIRM’s Business Development and Industry Engagement and Commercialization activities. 

In the midst of World Series season I’m in a team sports frame of mind. And as I help prepare CIRM for our annual foray to the Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa, I’m cheering on our teams of scientists who will be attending the meeting. The event is being held in La Jolla (the “mesa” in question) and runs October 14-16.

As part of that meeting, CIRM is helping to organize an Investor and Partnering Forum that helps establish relationships between scientists developing therapies, including our own disease teams, and the pharmaceutical companies and venture capital firms that can help advance those teams through human clinical trials. Establishing these relationships is not unlike pairing great players with the best teams, and in this case our own Neil Littman (Business Development Officer) and Elona Baum (General Counsel and Vice President of Business Development) will be on hand acting as biomedical sports agents to get the scientists and investors talking.

Six CIRM grantee teams will be presenting their projects in the hopes of attracting investors for their projects developing therapies for blindness, heart failure, leukemia, brain cancer, bone disease, and Parkinson’s disease.

Throughout the meeting, team Head Coach (and President) Alan Trounson will be on hand to discuss strategy and tactics while our Board Chair Jonathan Thomas will be networking among the box seats maximizing the financial side of team operations.

In the past year, CIRM’s own team has had some clear victories, with two Disease Teams entering clinical trials (for HIV/AIDS and heart disease) and many more of them completing meetings with the Food and Drug Administration to discuss getting approval to start a trial. We’ve also had some grantees spinout private companies to facilitate moving their projects into clinical trials.

Starting these clinical trials and talking to the FDA is not yet the big win of a therapy that’s widely available to patients, but in World Series terms, we’ve won a good number of the playoff games. Now, we’re doing everything we can to support those teams as they head toward the ultimate goal of new disease therapies.

Cynthia Schaffer