There’s a wonderful moment at the end of the movie The Candidate (starring Robert Redford, 87% approval on Rotten Tomatoes!) about a modern political campaign for a US Senate seat. Redford (spoiler alert) plays a come-from-behind candidate and at the end when he wins he turns to his campaign manager and says “Now what?”.

I think that’s how a lot of people associated with Proposition 71 felt when it was approved by California voters in 2004, creating CIRM. Now what? During the campaign you are so focused on crossing the finish line that when the campaign is over you have to pause because you just realized it wasn’t the finishing line, it was actually the starting line.

For us “now what” involved hiring a staff, creating oversight groups of scientists and ethics experts, developing strategies and then mechanisms for funding, and then mechanisms for tracking that funding to make sure it was being used properly. It was creating something from scratch and trying to do something that no state agency had done before.

Fifteen years later we are coming to the end of the funding provided by Prop 71 and that question keeps popping up again, “Now what?” And that’s what we are going to be talking about in our next Facebook Live.

We have three great experts on our panel. They are scientists and researchers and leaders in biotech, but also members of our CIRM Board. We rely on their experience and expertise in making key decisions and you can rely on them to pull back the curtain and talk about the things that matter most to them in helping advance our mission, and in helping secure our legacy.

Anne-Marie Duliege MD, has more than 25 years of experience in the medical world, starting out as a pediatrician and then moving into research. She has experience developing new therapies for auto-immune disorders, lung problems and infectious diseases.

Like Anne-Marie, Joe Panetta, has years of experience working in the research field, and is currently President & CEO of Biocom, the California association that advocates for more than 1,200 companies, universities and research institutes working in biotechnology.

Finally, Dave Martin MD, came to CIRM after stints at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), UC San Francisco, Genentech, Chiron and several other highly-regarded organizations. He is also the co-founder, chairman and CEO of AvidBiotics, a privately held biotechnology company in South San Francisco.

Each brings a different perspective to the work that we do at CIRM, and each enriches it not just with their intelligence and experience, but also with their compassion for the patients and commitment to our mission.

So, join us on Thursday, July 25^th from noon till 1pm (PDT) for a special Facebook Live “Ask the Stem Cell Team” to understand how we got where we are, how the rest of the field is doing, and what happens next. It promises to be a fascinating hour.