When we organized the first Stem Cell Awareness Day in 2008 it was a small affair with events in Australia, Canada and a couple venues in California. It has quickly grown to become a sufficiently grass roots event worldwide that we can’t capture all the activities. But we feature 10 events in the US and six international events at our web site stemcellday.com.

One entry in particular is truly international: the opening of a science museum exhibit “Super Cells” in Canada before it embarks on a five-year tour across North America, the United Kingdom, and potentially Europe as well. We wrote about the exhibit that CIRM helped to develop last week.

One event that fully embraces the spirit of the day this year will be at the annual Stem Cell Meeting on the Mesa in La Jolla, California. All the various players in the field, researchers, industry executives and investors come together at this annual gather on the famous La Jolla mesa to foster partnerships that can accelerate the movement of discoveries into therapies for patients. These international leaders will be joined by the public at an event on the second night of the meeting. The featured speaker will be Carl June, a real star of one of the field’s breakthrough therapies: using genes to modify cells to treat cancer and HIV.

In California, CIRM-funded institutions in San Diego, Irvine, Los Angeles, Berkeley and Sacramento will be hosting lab tours, seminars and other events for the public. We will also be matching CIRM grantees with high schools up and down the state to offer guests talks on stem cell science. We expect to reach at least 50 classes and more than a thousand students. Similar efforts are taking place in Toronto, Canada and in New York State.

Many of the activities today and throughout the month—we consider all of October a time to share stem cell knowledge—are focused on the general public. A list of those we are aware of can be found on the Stem Cell Awareness Day website.
If you can’t make one of these events but want to discover more about stem cells, here are a few of our best resources:
• stem cell basics
• Disease fact sheets
• A list of our therapies in development

This year attendees at all the events are likely to hear much more than in previous years about potential therapies that have made it through the pipeline and are now being tested (or close to being tested) in patients. The promise and hope of stem cell science is starting to be backed up by data.

Don Gibbons