Buckle up, we’re about to Accelerate

“You can’t teach fish to fly,” is one of the phrases that our CIRM President & CEO, Randy Mills, likes to throw out when asked why we needed to create new centers to help researchers move their most promising therapies out of the lab and into clinical trials.

His point is that many researchers are terrific at research but not so great at the form filling and other process-oriented skills needed to get approval from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for a clinical trial.

So instead of asking them to learn how to do all those things, why don’t we, CIRM, create a system that will do it for them? And that’s where we came up with the idea for the Accelerating Center (we’re also creating a Translating Center – that’s a topic for a future blog but if you can’t wait to find out the juicy details you can find them here.)

The Accelerating Center will be a clinical research organization that provides regulatory, operational and other support services to researchers and companies hoping to get their stem cell therapies into a clinical trial. The goal is to match the scientific skills of researchers with the regulatory and procedural skills of the Accelerating Center to move these projects through the review process as quickly as possible.

But it doesn’t end there. Once a project has been given the green light by the FDA, the Accelerating Center will help with actually setting up and running their clinical trial, and helping them with data management to ensure they get high quality data from the trial. Again these skills are essential to run a good clinical trial but things researchers may not have learned about when getting a PhD.

We just issued what we call an RFA (Request for Applications)  for people interested in partnering with us to help create the Accelerating Center. To kick-start the process we are awarding up to $15 million for five years to create the Center, which will be based in California.

To begin with, the Accelerating Center will focus on supporting CIRM-funded stem cell projects. But the goal is to eventually extend that support to other stem cell programs.

Now, to be honest, there’s an element of self-interest in all this. We have a goal under our new Strategic Plan of funding 50 new clinical trials over the next five years. Right now, getting a stem cell-related project approved is a slow and challenging process. We think the Accelerating Center is one tool to help us change that and give the most promising projects the support they need to get out of the lab and into people.

There’s a lot more we want to do to help speed up the approval process as well, including working with the FDA to create a new, streamlined regulatory process, one that is faster and easier to navigate. But that may take some time. So in the meantime, the Accelerating Center will help “fish” to do what they do best, swim, and we’ll take care of the flying for them.