Some phrases just bring a smile to your face: “It’s a girl/boy”, “Congratulations, you got the job”, and “Another beer sir?” (or maybe that last one is just me). One other phrase that makes me smile is “packed house”. That’s why I was smiling so much at our Patient Advocate Event at UC San Diego last week. The room was jammed with around 150 patients and patient advocates who had come to hear about the progress being made in stem cell research.
Jonathan Thomas, Chair of the CIRM governing Board, kicked off the event with a quick run-through of our research, focusing on our clinical trials. As we have now funded 29 clinical trials, it really was a quick run-through, but JT did focus on a couple of remarkable stories of cures for patients suffering from Severe Combined Immunodeficiency (SCID) and Chronic Granulomatous Disease.
His message was simple. We have come a long way, but we still have a long way to go to fulfill our mission of accelerating stem cell treatments to patients with unmet medical needs. We have a target of 40 new clinical trials by 2020 and JT stressed our determination to do everything we can to reach that goal.
David Higgins, Parkinson’s Disease Advocate and CIRM Board Member (Credit Cory Kozlovich, UCSD)
Next up was David Higgins, who has a unique perspective. David is a renowned scientist, he’s also the Patient Advocate for Parkinson’s disease on the CIRM Board, and he has Parkinson’s disease. David gave a heartfelt presentation on the changing role of the patient and their growing impact on health and science.
In the old days, David said, the patient was merely the recipient of whatever treatment a doctor determined was appropriate. Today, that relationship is much more like a partnership, with physician and patient working together to determine the best approach.
He said CIRM tries to live up to that model by engaging the voice of the patient and patient advocate at every stage of the approval process, from shaping concepts to assessing the scientific merits of a project and deciding whether to fund it, and then doing everything we can to help it succeed.
He said California can serve as the model, but that patients need to make their voices heard at the national level too, particularly in light of the proposed huge budget cuts for the National Institutes of Health.
Dr. Jennifer Braswell. (Credit Cory Kozlovich, UCSD)
U.C. San Diego’s Dr. Jennifer Braswell gave some great advice on clinical trials, focusing on learning how to tell a good trial from a questionable one, and the questions patients need to ask before agreeing to be part of one.
She said it has to:
- Be at a highly regarded medical center
- Be based on strong pre-clinical evidence
- Involved well-informed and compassionate physicians and nurses
- Acknowledge that it carries some risk.
“You all know that if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. If someone says a clinical trial carries no risk that’s a red flag, you know that’s not true. There is risk. Good researchers work hard to reduce the risk as much as possible, but you cannot eliminate it completely.”
She said even sites such as www.clinicaltrials.gov – a list of all the clinical trials registered with the National Institutes of Health – have to be approached cautiously and that you should talk to your own physican before signing up for anything.
Finally, UC San Diego’s Dr. Catriona Jamieson talked about her research into blood cancers, and how her work would not have been possible without the support of CIRM. She also highlighted the growing number of trials being carried out at through the CIRM Alpha Stem Cell Clinic Network, which helps scientists and researchers share knowledge and resources, enabling them to improve the quality of the care they provide patients.
The audience asked the panelists some great questions about the need for;
- A national patient database to make it easier to recruit people for clinical trials
- For researchers to create a way of letting people know if they didn’t get into a clinical trial so the patients wouldn’t get their hopes up
- For greater public education about physicians or clinics offering unproven therapies
Adrienne Shapiro, an advocate for sickle cell disease patients, asks a question at Thursday’s stem cell meeting in La Jolla. (Bradley J. Fikes)
The meeting showed the tremendous public interest in stem cell research, and the desire to move it ahead even faster.
This was the first of a series of free public events we are holding around California this year. Next up, Los Angeles. More details of that shortly.
The Stem Cellar 