On Valentine’s Day, Pat Brennan of the Orange County Register visited the home of CIRM grantees Brian Cummings and Aileen Anderson in Irvine. In addition to sharing a life, the couple also shares a research effort to develop a stem cell-based therapy for spinal cord injury. Their combined work has been funded in part with $3.6 million from CIRM (here are links to a SEED award and Early Translational II award to Cummings and a Basic Biology II award to Anderson).
Brennan walked with them to work, after tagging along on a dog walk and a trip to drop their 6-year-old daughter at school.
Later, the conversation transitions into a science meeting as the two take the 20-minute walk past UCI’s Ecological Preserve and into the Sue and Bill Gross Stem Cell Research Center. The energy-efficient building, with an open design to encourage chance meetings among scientists, houses a roster of high-powered researchers as well as their experimental subjects: rodents.
The center was seeded by $27 million in state stem-cell funding and $10 million from donors Bill and Sue Gross. The building was completed in 2010.
Now, researchers working there cultivate lines of human embryonic stem cells that can grow into a variety of cell types, from brain cells to liver and heart cells.
A trial based on work by the couple, in collaboration with StemCells, Inc is underway in Switzerland (we blogged about that trial here).
The $27 million in state stem cell funds was a Major Facilities grant from CIRM. The story goes on to discuss the origins of CIRM and misconceptions about stem cells:
Created by voter initiative – Proposition 71 in 2004 – CIRM is California’s $3 billion answer to federal restrictions on funding for stem-cell research. Those restrictions were started by the Bush administration and eased, but not eliminated, under President Obama.
Cummings said opposition to their research is based, in part, on incorrect assumptions.
A big one is that the research involves the destruction of embryos. In reality, they work with balls of cells created at an earlier stage of human development, called blastocysts – a distinction many opponents do not draw.
“Embryonic stem cells don’t come from embryos,” he said. “And they never have.”
The raw material comes from fertility clinics and otherwise would be discarded.
Cummings says those who say that such research is immoral have it wrong.
“The argument is backward,” he said. “It’s immoral to throw away this stuff and not use it to help someone.”
You can learn more about CIRM awards targeting spinal cord injuries and videos about the work on our web site.
A.A.
The Stem Cellar 
Couple of awesome people!:)
Hope their work succeeds!
When you feed a homeless person, is the end goal a profit? Patients are being starved for cures over money. The model has to change.
Heart-disease patients. The paralyzed. Families of people struggling with Alzheimer’s disease. So many had hoped cures were just around the corner.
But three years after the Obama administration’s easing of restrictions on embryonic stem-cell research, advocates for this young field are facing a reality check: Rather than seeing an avalanche of breakthroughs for all that ails mankind, patients find themselves waiting in the wings for a science that is in some ways still theoretical and often prohibitively expensive.
California-based Geron Corp., the first company in the US to begin testing therapies derived from human embryonic stem cells, shut down its program in November, saying it could never turn enough of a profit from its potential cure for spinal-cord injury to justify the hefty research price tag. The research had gotten the most attention politically because of the advocacy of “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve.
Geron said its research is sound; the decision was simply a financial one.
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/hard_cell_HZwM5BTgh3WgEFPzcl0y8H#ixzz1nVCU6O9T
Braun: For Freehold woman, paralyzed life became too much to bear
Paralyzed from the neck down, Christina taught herself how to paint
holding a brush in her mouth and her paintings were displayed in
galleries throughout the state. She became an advocate for stem cell
research and the needs of the paralyzed. She said she was hopeful a
cure could be found.
“I was in denial for at least the first year, thinking that my will
would be strong enough to cure me,” she wrote on her blog. “My
ignorance has caused me a lot of suffering. That’s why I think it’s
important to share my story.”
Bradshaw said Symanski told her she thought she could wait five to 10
years for a cure, but no more than that. About two years ago, her
mother said, she began researching how she could legally end her own
life.
http://blog.nj.com/njv_bob_braun/2012/02/braun_for_freehold_woman_paral.html
…what's wrong…hard to live off other's grief? Maybe this will wake a few people up to the cold realities of everyday life for some.