It was a very CIRMy news week on both the clinical trial and discovery research fronts. Here are some the highlights:

Stanford cancer-fighting spinout to Genentech: ‘Don’t eat me’ – San Francisco Business Times

Ron Leuty, of the San Francisco Business Times, reported this week on not one, but two news releases from CIRM grantee Forty Seven, Inc. The company, which originated from discoveries made in the Stanford University lab of Irv Weissman, partnered with Genentech and Merck KGaA to launch clinical trials testing their drug, Hu5F9-G4, in combination with cancer immunotherapies. The drug is a protein antibody that blocks a “don’t eat me” signal that cancer stem cells hijack into order to evade destruction by a cancer patient’s immune system.

Genentech will sponsor two clinical trials using its FDA-approved cancer drug, atezolizumab (TECENTRIQ®), in combination with Forty Seven, Inc’s product in patients with acute myeloid leukemia (AML) and bladder cancer. CIRM has invested $5 million in another Phase 1 trial testing Hu5F9-G4 in AML patients. Merck KGaA will test a combination treatment of its drug avelumab, or Bavencio, with Forty-Seven’s Hu5F9-G4 in ovarian cancer patients.

In total, CIRM has awarded Forty Seven $40.5 million in funding to support the development of their Hu5F9-G4 therapy product.

Novel regenerative drug for osteoarthritis entering clinical trials – The Scripps Research Institute

The California Institute for Biomedical Research (Calibr), a nonprofit affiliate of The Scripps Research Institute, announced on Tuesday that its CIRM-funded trial for the treatment of osteoarthritis will start treating patients in March. The trial is testing a drug called KA34 which prompts adult stem cells in joints to specialize into cartilage-producing cells. It’s hoped that therapy will regenerate the cartilage that’s lost in OA, a degenerative joint disease that causes the cartilage that cushions joints to break down, leading to debilitating pain, stiffness and swelling. This news is particularly gratifying for CIRM because we helped fund the early, preclinical stage research that led to the US Food and Drug Administration’s go-ahead for this current trial which is supported by a $8.4 million investment from CIRM.

And finally, for our Cool Stem Cell Image of the Week….

Genetic ‘switches’ behind human brain evolution – Science Daily

This artsy scientific imagery was produced by UCLA researcher Luis del la Torre-Ubieta, the first author of a CIRM-funded studied published this week in the journal, Cell. The image shows slices of the mouse (bottom middle), macaque monkey (center middle), and human (top middle) brain to scale.

The dramatic differences in brain size highlights what sets us humans apart from those animals: our very large cerebral cortex, a region of the brain responsible for thinking and complex communication. Torre-Ubieta and colleagues in Dr. Daniel Geschwind’s laboratory for the first time mapped out the genetic on/off switches that regulate the growth of our brains. Their results reveal, among other things, that psychiatric disorders like schizophrenia, depression and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) have their origins in gene activity occurring in the very earliest stages of brain development in the fetus. The swirling strings running diagonally across the brain slices in the image depict DNA structures, called chromatin, that play a direct role in the genetic on/off switches.