Our mission at CIRM is to accelerate the development of stem cell therapies for patients with unmet medical needs. One way we have been doing that is funding promising research to help it get through what’s called the “Valley of Death.” This is the time between a product or project showing promise and the time it shows that it actually works.

Many times the big pharmaceutical companies or deep pocketed investors, whose support is needed to cover the cost of clinical trials, don’t want to get involved until they see solid proof that this approach works. However, without that support the researchers can’t do the early stage clinical trials to get that proof.

The stem cell agency has been helping get these projects through this Catch 22 of medical research, giving them the support they need to get through the Valley of Death and emerge on the other side where Big Pharma is waiting, ready to take them from there.

We saw more evidence that Big Pharma is increasingly happy doing that this week with the news that the University of California, San Diego, is teaming up with GSK to develop a new approach to treating blood cancers.

Dr. Catriona Jamieson:
Photo courtesy Moores Cancer Center, UCSD

Dr. Catriona Jamieson is leading the UCSD team through her research that aims at killing the cancer stem cells that help tumors survive chemotherapy and other therapies, and then spread throughout the body again. This is work that we have helped fund.

In a story in The San Diego Union Tribune, reporter Brad Fikes says this is a big step forward:

“London-based GSK’s involvement marks a maturation of this aspect of Jamieson’s research from basic science to the early stages of discovering a drug candidate. Accelerating such research is a core purpose of CIRM, founded in 2004 to advance stem cell technology into disease therapies and diagnostics.”

The stem cell agency’s President and CEO, Dr. C. Randal Mills, is also quoted in the piece saying:

“This is great news for Dr. Jamieson and UCSD, but most importantly it is great news for patients. Academic-industry partnerships such as this bring to bear the considerable resources necessary to meaningfully confront healthcare’s biggest challenges. We have been strong supporters of Dr. Jamieson’s work for many years and I think this partnership not only reflects the progress that she has made, but just as importantly it reflects how the field as a whole has progressed.”

As the piece points out, academic researchers are very good at the science but are not always as good at turning the results of the research into a marketable product. That’s where having an industry partner helps. The companies have the experience turning promising therapies into approved treatments.

As Scott Lippman, director of the Moores Cancer Center at UCSD, said of the partnership:

“This is a wonderful example of academia-industry collaboration to accelerate drug development and clinical impact… and opens the door for cancer stem cell targeting from a completely new angle.”

With the cost of carrying out medical research and clinical trials rising it’s hard for scientists with limited funding to go it alone. That’s why these partnerships, with CIRM and industry, are so important. Working together we make it possible to speed up the development and testing of therapies, and get them to patients as quickly as possible.