When it rains it pours.

This week, multiple CIRM-funded studies appeared in the news, highlighting the exciting progress our Agency is making towards funding innovative stem cell research and promoting the development of promising stem cell therapies for patients.

Below are highlights.

Fate Therapeutics Partners with UC San Diego to Develop Cancer Immunotherapy

Last week, Dr. Dan Kaufman and his team at UC San Diego, received a $5.15 million therapeutic translational research award from CIRM to advance the clinical development of a stem cell-derived immunotherapy for acute myelogenous leukemia (AML), a rare form of blood cancer.

Today, it was announced that the UCSD team is entering into a research collaboration with a San Diego biopharmaceutical company Fate Therapeutics to develop a related immunotherapy for blood cancers. The therapy consists of immune cells called chimeric antigen receptor-targeted natural killer (CAR NK) cells that can target tumor cells and stop their growth. Fate Therapeutics has developed an induced pluripotent stem cell (iPSC) platform to develop and optimize CAR NK cell therapies targeting various cancers.

According to an article by GenBio, this new partnership is already bearing fruit.

“In preclinical studies using an ovarian cancer xenograft model, Dr. Kaufman and Fate Therapeutics had shown that a single dose of CAR-targeted NK cells derived from iPSCs engineered with the CAR construct significantly inhibited tumor growth and increased survival compared to NK cells containing a CAR construct commonly used for T-cell immunotherapy.”

City of Hope Brain Cancer Trial Featured as a Key Trial to Watch in 2018

Xconomy posted a series this week forecasting Key Clinical Data to look out for next year. Today’s part two of the series mentioned a recent CIRM-funded trial for glioblastoma, an aggressive, deadly brain cancer.

Christine Brown and her team at the City of Hope are developing a CAR-T cell therapy that programs a patient’s own immune cells to specifically target and kill cancer cells, including cancer stem cells, in the brain. You can read more about this therapy and the Phase 1 trial on our website.

Alex Lash, Xconomy’s National Biotech Editor, argued that good results for this trial would be a “huge step forward for CAR-T”.

Alex Lash

“While CAR-T has proven its mettle in certain blood cancers, one of the biggest medical questions in biotech is whether the killer cells can also eat up solid tumors, which make up the majority of cancer cases. Glioblastoma—an aggressive and usually incurable brain cancer—is a doozy of a solid tumor.”

ViaCyte Receives Innovative New Product Award for Type 1 Diabetes

Last week, San Diego-based ViaCyte was awarded the “Most Innovative New Product Award” by CONNECT, a start-up accelerator focused on innovation, for its PEC-Direct product candidate. The product is a cell-based therapy that’s currently being tested in a CIRM-funded clinical trial for patients with high-risk type 1 diabetes.

In a company news release published today, ViaCyte’s CEO Paul Laikind commented on what the award signifies,

Paul Laikind

“This award acknowledges how ViaCyte has continually broken new ground in stem cell research, medical device engineering, and cell therapy scaling and manufacturing. With breakthrough technology, clinical stage product candidates, an extensive intellectual property estate, and a strong and dedicated team, ViaCyte has all the pieces to advance a transformative new life-saving approach that could help hundreds of thousands of people with high-risk type 1 diabetes around the world.”