CIRM Board launches a new voyage of Discovery (Kevin McCormack).
Basic or early stage research is the Rodney Dangerfield of science; it rarely gets the respect it deserves. Yesterday, the CIRM governing Board showed that it not only respects this research, but also values its role in laying the foundation for everything that follows.

The CIRM Board approved 11 projects, investing more than $20.5 million in our Discovery Quest, early stage research program. Those include programs using gene editing techniques to develop a cure for a rare but fatal childhood disease, finding a new approach to slowing down the progress of Parkinson’s disease, and developing a treatment for the Zika virus.

Electron micrograph of Zika virus (red circles). Image: CDC/Cynthia Goldsmith

The goal of the Discovery Quest program is to identify and explore promising new stem cell therapies or technologies to improve patient care.

In a news release Randy Mills, CIRM’s President & CEO, said we hope this program will create a pipeline of projects that will ultimately lead to clinical trials:

“At CIRM we never underestimate the importance of early stage scientific research; it is the birth place of groundbreaking discoveries. We hope these Quest awards will not only help these incredibly creative researchers deepen our understanding of several different diseases, but also lead to new approaches on how best to use stem cells to develop treatments.”

Creating the world’s largest stem cell bank for sickle cell disease (Karen Ring).
People typically visit the bank to deposit or take out cash, but with advancements in scientific research, people could soon be visiting banks to receive life-saving stem cell treatments. One of these banks is already in the works. Scientists at the Center for Regenerative Medicine (CReM) at Boston Medical Center are attempting to generate the world’s largest stem cell bank focused specifically on sickle cell disease (SCD), a rare genetic blood disorder that causes red blood cells to take on an abnormal shape and can cause intense pain and severe organ damage in patients.

To set up their bank, the team is collecting blood samples from SCD patients with diverse ethnic backgrounds and making induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) from these samples. These patient stem cell lines will be used to unravel new clues into why this disease occurs and to develop new potential treatments for SCD. More details about this new SCD iPSC bank can be found in the latest edition of the journal Stem Cell Reports.

Gustavo Mostoslavsky, M.D., PH.D., Martin Steinberg, M.D., George Murphy PH.D.
Photo: Boston Medical Center

In a news release, CReM co-founder and Professor, Gustavo Mostoslavsky, touched on the future importance of their new stem cell bank:

“In addition to the library, we’ve designed and are using gene editing tools to correct the sickle hemoglobin mutation using the stem cell lines. When coupled with corrected sickle cell disease specific iPSCs, these tools could one day provide a functional cure for the disorder.”

For researchers interested in using these new stem cell lines, CReM is making them available to researchers around the world as part of the NIH’s NextGen Consortium study.

DNA deep dive reveals ways to increase iPSC efficiency (Todd Dubnicoff)
Though the induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cell technique was first described ten years ago, many researchers continue to poke, prod and tinker with the method which reprograms an adult cell, often from skin, into an embryonic stem cell-like state which can specialize into any cell type in the body. Though this breakthrough in stem cell research is helping scientists better understand human disease and develop patient-specific therapies, the technique is hampered by its low efficiency and consistency.

This week, a CIRM-funded study from UCLA reports new insights into the molecular changes that occur during reprogramming that may help pave the way toward better iPS cell methods. The study, published in Cell, examined the changes in DNA during the reprogramming process.

Senior authors Kathrin Plath and Jason Ernst and first authors Petko Fiziev and Constantinos Chronis.
Photo: UCLA

In a skin cell, the genes necessary for embryonic stem cell-like, or pluripotent, characteristics are all turned off. One way this shut down in gene activity occurs is through tight coiling of the DNA where the pluripotent genes are located. This physically blocks proteins called transcriptions factors from binding the DNA and activating those pluripotent genes within skin cells. On the other hand, regions of DNA carrying skin-related genes are loosely coiled, so that transcription factors can access the DNA and turn on those genes.

The iPS cell technique works by artificially adding four pluripotent transcriptions factors into skin cells which leads to changes in DNA coiling such that skin-specific genes are turned off and pluripotent genes are turned on. The UCLA team carefully mapped the areas where the transcription factors are binding to DNA during the reprogramming process. They found that the shut down of the skin genes and activation of the pluripotent genes occurs at the same time. The team also found that three of the four iPS cell factors must physically interact with each other to locate and activate the areas of DNA that are responsible for reprogramming.

Using the findings from those experiments, the team was able to identify a fifth transcription factor that helps shut down the skin-specific gene more effectively and, in turn, saw a hundred-fold increase in reprogramming efficiency. These results promise to help the researchers fine-tune the iPS cell technique and make its clinical use more practical.