It’s tradition to begin the New Year by making a resolution. Wikipedia has a wonderful description of what this involves saying it is where “a person makes a promise to do an act of self-improvement or something slightly nice, such as opening doors for people beginning from New Year’s Day.”

Well, by that criteria, CIRM 2.0 is a perfect way for us to start 2015 because it is both an act of self-improvement and something “slightly nice” (love that phrase).

2.0, for those of you who haven’t been following us, is a rather dramatic overhaul of the way we do business. It’s about streamlining the way we work in a way that places added emphasis on speed, partnerships and patients.

CIRM 2.0 makes it easier for both companies and academic researchers with promising projects to partner with CIRM to get the support they need when they need it, reducing the time from application to funding from around two years to just 120 days – that’s the “self-improvement”.

In a news release marking the launch of 2.0, our President and CEO Randy Mills summed up the reason why we are making these changes:

“Our mission is to accelerate the development of stem cell therapies for patients with unmet medical needs. Today, in officially launching the first three programs under CIRM 2.0, we have boldly reaffirmed our commitment to continuously seek new and innovative ways to better serve that mission.”

Simply put, we hope that by improving the way we work we can help speed up the development of treatments for patients in need. I would say that more than qualifies as being “slightly nice.”

You can hear Randy talking about CIRM 2.0 here

This is just the first phase of our new look. In December our governing Board gave us $50 million to get this up and running for clinical stage work over the next six months (you can find links to the Program Announcements for that work on our news release). Later this year we are going to expand 2.0 to include both discovery – or basic – research and translational research.

We are now in our 11^th year as an agency funding stem cell research. Last year was a big year for us with 8 projects we are funding approved for clinical trials. But as we see every New Year, getting a little older shouldn’t stop you from wanting to improve or making the next year or years even better. Or from just doing something “slightly nice” for others.